Threads
by Ceres Wunderkind
Summary: Will, Lyra and Mary Malone join forces across the worlds to prevent the Subtle Knife from falling into the wrong hands. Old friends are there to help but there will be betrayal, death and destruction before the end...
1. Oxford

_Introduction_

This story is a sequel to my earlier tale _Intentions_.  You really ought to read _Intentions_ before starting on this, but I'll understand it if you'd rather not.  All you really need to know is that in _Intentions_, the Subtle Knife, which was broken at the end of _The Amber Spyglass_, was reforged and passed from Will Parry to Giancarlo Bellini.  The angel Remiel gave Giancarlo the task of using it to restore the Exiles, such as Lyra Belacqua's half-sister Lizzie Boreal, who had been stranded in alien worlds when the angels closed the windows that the Knife had made, to their home worlds.  Now read on…

_The John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford_

Even though it is well past ten o'clock in the morning, Dr Will Parry is still asleep.  This is not because he is lazy, but because he is extremely tired.  He is tired because he has been on duty for over thirty-six hours and this is the first opportunity for rest that has presented itself to him since eleven o'clock the previous night, when the pubs started turning out.

Medical students the world around are noted for the intensity and scale of their parties.  Some say that they need to get all their partying over and done with when they are young, for there will be few opportunities later in their careers when they will, as fully qualified doctors and surgeons, be expected to be available at any time.  Others, and their view is more likely to be correct, say that it's a good idea for the young medics to become used to a regime of sleep deprivation for, as young doctors, a permanent state of tiredness is an expected part of their daily existence.

Quite why it is such a good idea for vulnerable patients to be exposed to inexperienced doctors who can hardly keep their eyes open is one of those mysteries of the medical profession to which lay persons are not privy.  It is simply the way things are done; and if some elderly surgeon, who has graduated beyond the title of "doctor" to the far grander salutation of "mister", were to hear that the youngsters were to be allowed to work civilised hours, he would be very resentful, for did he not go through this very same ordeal by fatigue when he was at the start of his own career?  And did it do him any harm?  And if not, why should these young sprogs have it any easier than he did?

And so the cycle continues.  There is a hierarchy in medicine, as in all the other ancient professions, and Dr Will Parry is at the bottom of it.

It is Saturday morning, and the Accident and Emergency department is quiet.  There are a few minor cases in the waiting room – a child whose fingers were trapped in a cupboard door is comforted by his grandmother and a dazed motorcyclist with his arm in a sling is waiting for a taxi to take him home.  The rush will start about lunchtime.  The M40 motorway is nearby and road accident cases tend to be taken first to the A&E department at the John Radcliffe.  There will also no doubt be a number of casualties involving lawn mowers, ladders and bottles of bleach as the people of Oxford take advantage of the fine weather to get down to their spring cleaning and gardening.

Staff Nurse Beckley, just come on duty, looks in at the door of the small room where Will Parry lies asleep.  She would never be so foolish as to imagine that the relationship between her and Dr Parry could ever be anything other than purely professional in nature, but all the same she likes to look at him when he is off-guard, so to speak.  His strong, determined face relaxes and becomes softer and more likeable.  She has not often met such an intense man, even among the doctors, who tend to single-mindedness.  Will is not known for his command of the social graces and Nurse Beckley has found it difficult to get more than a few words out of him, even when he is off-duty.

She suspects that there is more to Dr Parry's reclusive nature than simple dedication to the Hippocratic Oath.  There are rumours that he has a mother who would, in the days before care in the community became the norm, have been regarded as a hopeless mental case and confined to an asylum.  Someone once discovered that his father disappeared when he was a baby and also that there something odd had happened – a death and a disappearance – at his home in Winchester when he was a boy of twelve or thirteen.  He has… an air about him.  Of grief kept under restraint, of a terrible loss sustained.

He has no girlfriend, or indeed close friends of any kind, it seems.  In medicine, which is a profession in which progress is secured by contacts and networking as much as by competence, the knack of making friends easily is a valuable asset and it is said that, despite his obvious ability, Dr Parry may never rise very far.  He often seems, even in a crowded room, to _disappear_.  'I was talking to him,' someone might say, ' and suddenly he wasn't there any more.'

'You mean he'd drifted off; like he wasn't paying attention?'

'No, he'd actually walked away and I'd never seen him go.  It was the strangest thing.  It was as if my eyes couldn't see him.'

'The Invisible Doctor!'

'It wasn't funny.  It was as creepy as hell.  As a doctor, he'd make a great pickpocket.'

'Is he any good?'

'At picking pockets?'

'No!  Is he a good doctor?'

'Best of his year.  But he didn't get any prizes.  Nobody noticed him.'

And so it goes.  Nurse Beckley sighs, closes the door and goes about her duties, which are, at this quiet time, mainly clerical in nature.

_The Oxford Ring Road_

'For Christ's sake, step on it!'

'I'm sorry, sir.  There's a speed limit through Cowley.'

'Don't be ridiculous, man.  This is no time to be observing speed limits.'

'Sorry, sir.  I don't want to lose my licence.'

'Stop the bloody car!'

The dark blue Lexus pulls off the Ring Road and into a residential street, lined with semi-detached houses.  The front seat passenger moves across to the driver's seat, pushing the uniformed chauffeur out of the car and onto the pavement.  With a squeal of tyres the Lexus performs a U-turn and shoots out of the side road back onto the Ring Road.  The chauffeur shouts 'Hoi!  Wait!' but he is wasting his breath.  Disconsolately, he takes out his phone and calls for a taxi.

The man who is now behind the wheel of the Lexus is a fast and aggressive driver.  He weaves at high speed through the Saturday morning traffic, uses his horn liberally and ignores the flashing headlights and angry gestures of the road users whom he inconveniences in his hurry.

On the bloodstained back seat of the car a young man is gazing out of the window with a shocked look on his face.  The woman sitting next to him tightens the tourniquet on his right arm and keeps her other hand on the icebox which is wedged between her and the door.  The violent motion of the vehicle is making her and the injured man feel very sick indeed. 

Hazard lights flashing and horn furiously blaring, the Lexus races through Headington past the main gate of the John Radcliffe Hospital and screeches to a halt outside the A&E department.  The woman helps the young man out of the car and the driver runs after them, with the icebox tucked underneath his arm.

A tide of human frailty flows though the wards and waiting rooms of every hospital and the doctors and nurses, despite their best intentions, often forget about the actual people involved in their work.  They are a cardiac arrest, or a carcinoma, or a trauma, or a liver failure, rather than Peter Jones, or James May, or Rebecca Henson, or Marjorie Bennet.  The children – often they remember the children that pass through their hands, but the detachment that doctors need to adopt to help them put their feelings aside and simply do their jobs as well as possible means that individual faces and names are easily forgotten.

However, the pale young man who is being rushed through the front doors of Accident and Emergency is not someone whom either Staff Nurse Beckley or Doctor Parry will forget in a hurry.


	2. Cittagazze

_Cittagazze_

Guilietta gets out of bed, and throws a warm wrap over her nightgown.  The night sky is clear and the moon is shining brightly through the window, sharply illuminating the interior of her bedroom.  She tiptoes on unshod feet over the tiled floor towards the door and opens it carefully.  Fortunately, its hinges don't squeak.  Her father is a light sleeper and he would be angry with her if he found her wandering about the house in the middle of the night.  Hugging the wall to keep to the shadows and avoid any loose tiles that might rattle and give her away, she inches down the passageway towards her brother's room.  He is still awake, she can see.  A flickering yellow light is escaping from underneath his door.

She pushes the door open carefully and enters her brother's room.  Like her own it is lightly furnished; there are a bed, a chest of drawers and a wardrobe.  Under the window stands a large rectangular table, piled high with books and papers, and in front of it there is an upright chair.  Her brother Giancarlo is sitting in the chair, hunched forward with his elbows on the table, studying a book by the light of the candle whose yellow beams were visible from the hallway outside.  Distracted from his studies by Guilietta's entrance, he turns round.  He is about to speak when he sees that his sister has pressed a finger to her lips.  He nods, acknowledging her demand for silence.

Giancarlo points questioningly to the window above the table.  Guilietta nods.  He climbs up onto the table and opens the window.  Guilietta, standing on the chair, follows him.  He opens the window, climbs through it onto the red pantiled roof beyond and lies flat, extending his hand down towards the girl who is now waiting for him on the table below.  She takes hold of it and he lifts her up onto the roof next to him.

'The harbour?' he asks.

'Yes.  Our usual place,' she replies.

They tread carefully across the roof, making sure not to break any tiles, until they reach the back of the house, where a plane tree's branches brush against the wall.  Giancarlo makes a leap for the strongest branch and Guilietta follows him, catching his hand.  They wriggle along the branch to the trunk of the tree and swarm down it to the ground.  They turn and look towards the house.  There are no sounds, no lights.  Nobody has been disturbed by their departure.

They run across the leaf-dappled ground to the gate, which stands half-open.  Slipping through it, they join the dusty lane which leads from their home down to the sea.

Hand in hand, clinging to the whitewashed walls, keeping to the shadowed side of the streets, they pass silently down the lanes and steps from their father's villa in the hills on the outskirts of the town of Cittagazze towards the harbour.  Everywhere it is quiet; brilliant white or pitch dark under the full moon.  Above them, the bright stars shine down, faithful and constant.  The night air is springtime-cool; the blazing mid-days and breathless nights of summer still a month or two away.

Both Giancarlo and Guilietta love the nights of Cittagazze.  Giancarlo, because one January night ten years ago he led his dying father back home from London.  Home to the place he thought he had lost forever and on to a new reason for living.  Guilietta, because she is naturally drawn to the magic of the night and also because it was it was on a July evening that she first met her brother, whom she has adored ever since.

A little more confidently now that they are out of earshot of home, the brother and sister tread softly past the abandoned palazzos and hotels which cluster together near the seafront.  They cross the promenade and then, turning left, they follow the harbour wall until they find the gap where a set of stone steps leads down to the waterside.

Theirs is the ninth step down from the pavement – just far enough to be invisible from the roadway, still high enough to be able to see over the far harbour wall to the bay beyond.  This is _their_ place; where they can tell each other their secrets and their stories, and share their hopes and fears.

Guilietta sits with her knees drawn up in front of her, making a tent of her nightgown.  Her brother, in shirt and trousers, stretches out between her and the harbour wall.  She snuggles up next to him.

'I'm glad you came,' he says.

'Is the studying so very hard?' she asks.

'No, it's not the studying.  Though that's bad enough.'  Guilietta has not started school yet; not seriously, anyway.  She spends two hours a day with her aunt Dorabella, having the rudiments of reading and writing dinned into her head.  Aunt Dorabella is a formidable lady, and a stern taskmistress.

'Is it a girl?'  Giancarlo smiles at his little sister's precocity.

'No, little Guili, it's not a girl.'  He has grown into a very handsome young man and more than one love-struck young woman has tried to use Guilietta's influence to help her to get his attention.

The air has been still up to this point, but now a soft breeze blows offshore for a minute or two, carrying the scents of lavender, rosemary and thyme down from the soft green hills above the town.  The boy and girl are silent, each safely wrapped in the other's love, each waiting for the other to speak but content in the meantime to sit and watch the gentle waves as they lap against the fishing boats in the harbour below.

Giancarlo puts his arm around his sister's shoulder.  'Signore Fratelli came to see me again this afternoon.'

'Signore Fratelli?  The man who wants the Knife?'

'Yes.  Only he brought another man with him this time.  He was… different.  Fratelli's an idiot really, though he talks big.  This new man didn't say much, but he frightened me.'

Guilietta is amazed.  Her big brother Giancarlo, frightened?

'He didn't say much, but he didn't need to.  He, or the people who sent him, want to use the Knife for their own reasons.  I don't think they care much about the damage it would cause.'  And, Giancarlo thinks, they may not care very much about the people they hurt.  He looks at Guilietta, who has had, as yet, little experience of the evil things that men do when they follow a cause, and hugs her a little closer to him.  She looks up to him and smiles in a way that tears at his heart.  How can he live up to the trust she has in him?  Suppose that Fratelli, or his new associate, decide to use his father or his sister as a means of persuading him to do as they wish?

'Why do they want it, Carlo?  They can't use it.  Only you can do that.'

'Yes.  I am the Knife-bearer, and there can only ever be one.'  Giancarlo takes the Subtle Knife from its sheath at his side.  He has never let it out of his reach since that night in the other world when it passed to him.  He holds it up in the moonlight, where it shimmers with an eerie gleam.  After all these years, it is still the most beautiful and deadly thing that he has ever seen; and he has seen many strange things in his young life.

The reflected light from the Knife shows up Guilietta's face in the darkness, pale and concerned for him.  Giancarlo puts it safely back in its sheath.

'No, they cannot take the Knife from me by force, for I would kill them, and even if they did take it they couldn't use it unless it consented to leave me and go on to one of them.'

'But what do they want it for?'

'They want to bring back the old days'

'The old days?  You mean with the Spectres?'

'They don't want the Spectres back, that's for sure.  But they do want the other things the Knife of the Torre degli Angeli brought.'

'What things, Carlo?'

Giancarlo waves his hand in the direction of the town, up the steps behind them.  'Our town; it's called the City of Magpies, yes?'

'Yes, Carlo.'

'And what do magpies do, mia cara?'

'They fly about, and,' she giggles, 'they poo on the buildings and people and…'

'Yes?'

'They steal things.  Pretty things, like my silver bracelet that went missing last year.'

'That's right.  They steal things.  So did we, for years and years and years.'

'We did?  What sort of things did we steal?'

'Anything.  Everything.  Food, to put in the refrigerators.  Electricity, to light the streets and work the refrigerators.  Gas, to work the stoves to cook the food.  Clothes, and other goods, to fill up the shops.  You've never had a fizzy drink, have you?'

'A fizzy drink?  What's that?'

'It's a coke, or a pepsi, or an irn-bru.  It comes in a tin can and you keep it cold in a refrigerator and you take it out and pop the top open and drink it straight from the can, and it's full of bubbles like vino spumante, only it doesn't make you feel funny like wine does.  It just makes you burp a lot.  The thing is, because of the Spectres there were no grown-ups to make the drinks.  They had to be stolen from the world they were made in, which meant that they had to be taken through the windows the Knife had cut.'

Guilietta understands little of what her brother is saying, but she nods to show that she is following him.

'We stole everything.  We forgot how to look after ourselves.  We just took what we wanted from the worlds that the Knife opened up for us.  And when the Spectres came, we thought that perhaps they were not such a  terrible price to pay, if only a few of us died every year, if only we could carry on getting the things we wanted for free, without having to work for them, or think how to make them for ourselves.

'That life ended twelve years ago, when the windows were closed.  When Papa and I were stranded in the other world where we had gone to live with my mother.'

'Was she my mother too?'  Guilietta asks sleepily.

'No, silly.   You know what happened.  Your mother… died, and then you came to live with us.'

'Yes, that's right.'  Guilietta likes this story.  'Mama was taken away to Heaven by the angels, and they took me and led me to you and Papa and we all live happily together in our lovely vine-covered villa above the beautiful town of Cittagazze.'  She recites this in a sing-song voice that shows that she is nearly asleep.

'Come on, Guili.  It's time we were going home.'  Giancarlo gets up and pulls his sister up the harbour steps behind him.  Retracing their path up the hill, they enter the pathway that leads to their home.

'Hell!'  There are lights shining out of the ground-floor windows.  It looks as if their nocturnal escapade has been discovered.  They will both be in trouble now.  'Stay here, Guili.'

Giancarlo runs to the unshuttered window and peers through the corner.  Who is up?  Is it his father or his aunt Dorabella?

It is his father.  But he is not alone.  There are two men with him, and their voices are raised.

'Bellini, it is no good lying to us.'  That is Fratelli, the head of the town council.

'But it is true.  I do not know where they are.'

'You do, and you will tell us.'  The other man, the dangerous-looking man who came to the house earlier, steps forward and slaps the back of his hand hard across Giovanni Bellini's face.  He falls backwards into a chair.  The man leans forward over him.

'Let me make this absolutely clear to you.  We will have the Knife, and the boy.  You have no right to stop us.  There has been a decision made, and an Order passed in Council.  It is the law.  You must tell us where Giancarlo is, or suffer the consequences.'

'Perhaps he really doesn't know.'

'Shut up, Fratelli.  You are a fool.  Now, old man, tell us!'  The man punches Giovanni Bellini hard in the stomach.  He folds up, retching.

Giancarlo knows that he can rush into the room, draw the Knife, and kill the two men who are tormenting his father.  Or he can simply hand it over to them and obey their orders.  But he remembers the words of Will Parry at Stonehenge, ten years before:

_'There are three important things that you must learn.  They are the laws which every Knife-bearer must obey.  Some of them didn't obey them and a lot of harm came from it._

_'The first law is this: use the Knife only when you have to.  Do not use it lightly, or just for fun, for it is a dangerous tool._

_'The second law is to open a window for the shortest time possible.  An open window causes great damage to the life of the Universe._

_'And the third law is the most important one: never leave a window open.  When its job is done, close it.'_

He knows that these men know nothing of the Laws of the Knife and that they would not obey them even if they did.  And that if he used it to kill, the killing would never end.

Their only possible choice is to run away, in the hope that the men will realise that his father is speaking the truth and leave him alone.  They are wretchedly badly prepared for flight – they have no food or water and Guilietta is wearing only her nightclothes and a wrap, and she has no shoes.  He returns to the gate, where his sister is waiting.

'Guili, sweetheart, we must go away now, very quickly,' he says softly.

'Why, Carlo?'

'The bad men have come back and they are looking for us.  Our only chance is to get as far away as we can.'

'Can I fetch Freda?'

'No, sorry.  She'll be safe at home.  Come on, we must go!'

The boy and girl run up the lane away from the town and into the hills; Giancarlo sick with worry for his father and Guilietta weeping bitter tears for the favourite doll that she has had to leave behind.


	3. Oxford

_Oxford_

Will Parry finally finishes work at three o'clock in the afternoon.  He climbs into his ten year old VW Golf and drives home with extreme care.  The last thing he needs now is to be stopped by the police and suffer the indignity of being fined and having his licence endorsed for being unfit to drive through tiredness.

Closely followed by his cat-daemon Kirjava, he opens his front door and hangs up his coat in the hall.

He has a ground floor flat in an old house which overlooks the Oxford Canal.  The back garden runs all the way down to the towpath – an obvious security risk, but well worth it for the privilege of being able to sit and watch the boats pass up and down the canal on their way to the river Isis or the town of Banbury.

Will knows that he ought to go straight to bed and get some much-needed sleep, but he has things on his mind.  Like this morning's case.  He needs to talk it over with somebody.  Somebody outside the medical profession; somebody who can give him an intelligent outsider's view of what has happened.

He knows just the person.

Will sits in the fireside chair in his sitting-room, points his phone at the TV opposite him and speaks the single word 'Mary.'  The TV lights up blue as the phone uplinks to it, and it displays the message: _Calling Mary_.

Ten seconds later, the blue screen is replaced by Mary Malone's face.

'Will!  Hello!  What's up?'

'Hello Mary.  Can you talk?  Where are you?'  The picture is unusually grainy and he wonders if she is in an area of poor reception.

'All the time in the world to talk to you, Will.'  Mary winks with exaggerated irony.  'I'm in Colombo, Sri Lanka.  At the University.'

'You're not off on _another_ jolly!'

'Particle physics is a hard row to hoe.'  Mary winks again.  Will can see that she is holding a glass of something.  'This is the sort of thing we poor researchers have to put up with, every now and again.'

'Mary, find yourself a quiet corner.'  There are party sounds coming from the TV speakers.  'I need to ask your advice.'

'All right, Will.  Get yourself a drink too.'

'What's the time there?'

'About half-past ten.'  Mary finds herself a table in a corner of the bar where she and her colleagues have been relaxing after a hard day of presenting and reviewing scientific papers.  She puts her phone down on the table in front of her and its lens swivels round and locks onto her face.  It hunts for a suitable screen and projects Will's image onto a white paper plate which she has found and rested against a spare glass.  Will's phone transmits a picture of his empty chair for thirty seconds until he returns, holding a whisky-and-soda.

'Cheers!'  They chink glasses in virtual space.

'Now what's all this about?  Heard from Lizzie or Lyra recently?  How are they?'

'I talked to Lizzie last week.  They're both fine.'

'And that nice nurse you introduced me to?'

'Judy?  Yes, she's fine, too.  Mary, she's not my girlfriend or anything.  Stop trying to fix me up!

'Now listen.  And put that glass down!'  Will and Kirjava can see Mary's daemon perched on her left shoulder, even over the phone link.  He pecks her on the cheek and turns and looks at Kirjava, who is curled up on Will's lap.  The daemons are the key – the key to everything.

'There was a man came in this morning.  Amputation of the right arm, just above the elbow.'

'What, like with a chainsaw or something?'

'Yes, and no.  I mean, I've seen things like this before, gardening mishaps or road accidents, but this case was different.'

Will had been woken by the crash call on his bleeper and simultaneously by Staff Nurse Judy Beckley knocking on the door.  'Dr Parry!  Casualty!'  He'd rushed into A&E reception to see a young man being carried in, supported by a woman and a middle-aged man.  His arm had been tied up in a tourniquet just below the shoulder but he had obviously lost a great deal of blood.  'The icebox!' the woman had called out, and Will immediately understood what had happened.  Something had severed the patient's arm and it had been preserved in the icebox in the hope that it could be sewn back on.

'We can do a lot these days.  The nanoes see to the nerves while we concentrate on the bones, muscles, veins and arteries.  I've heard of patients getting ninety-eight percent of their limb function back after an amputation, especially is the cut is clean.'

'And was the cut – oh, bugger off!  Sorry, Will.'  A drunken figure lurches against Mary, confusing the phone so that its lens whirls randomly around the room before it catches sight of Mary again and refocuses on her face.

'Was the cut clean, you were going to ask?'

'Yes.'

'It was the cleanest cut I've seen since…'

'Since when?'

'Since… this.'  And Will holds up his hand, the one with the two missing fingers.

'The Knife?'

'No, it can't be the Knife.  I'd know, or Kirjava would know, if the Knife came into in this world again.  Mary, do you know anything that can slice so cleanly that it leaves a mirror finish on the cut faces?'

'One or two.  Tell me, were there any signs of burning?'

'No, no cauterisation.'

'So it couldn't have been a laser or an energy weapon.  They didn't bring in the thing that had done it?'

'No.  It was very hard to get any details out of them at all.'

'What was the patient's name?'

'Farrell.  Jack Farrell.'

'A fine Irish name!  Where was he from?'

'They said Abingdon.'

'Get any other names?'

'No.'

'Hmmm.  Leave it with me, Will.  I've got some ideas, but I'll need to do some checking up first.  Get some sleep.  You look dreadful.'

'Thanks, Mary.  Have another one for me.'

'Bye.'

'Bye.'

Will takes a quick shower and falls into bed, Kirjava lying next to him, close to his heart.  'I must talk to Lizzie about this,' he thinks, as sleep overtakes him.


	4. Oxford, Colombo and Cittagazze

_Near Cittagazze_

It is mid-morning, and already the sun is beginning to feel oppressively hot in the hills above the town of Cittagazze.  Giancarlo and Guilietta are sleeping, arms wrapped around each other, in the shade of a walnut tree which nestles in the bed of a narrow gully.

They stumbled into this small gap between the hills two hours earlier, searching desperately for water.  They found it; a rill flowing between the rocks in the bottom of the valley, just as Giancarlo was beginning to think that they would have to return to the town and surrender to Signor Fratelli.  His sister was showing visible signs of distress, clinging to him and crying softly.

Giancarlo knows that they cannot stay long in this oasis.  They made slow progress during the night and early morning and are probably still only two or three miles from the town and their pursuers.

Their pursuers…  They are men without scruples, who will not hesitate to take advantage of any weaknesses in himself or his father or sister.  Was he right to abandon his father to them?  It was an impossible choice and his dreams are haunted by the fear that he may have chosen wrongly.

A cloud passes over the sun, and Giancarlo is woken by the sudden chill.  He groans, as he realises that he has been lying against a stone and it has dug into his side.  They cannot stay here much longer; they must find food and shelter soon.

'Guili.  Guili, wake up.'

'Carlo?'

'Guili, it's time we were going.  Come on, sweetheart, up we get.'

Protesting feebly, Guilietta allows herself to be pulled to her feet.

'Please, where are we going?'

'We've got to keep moving.  The bad men are still after us.'

_This is not going well_, Giancarlo tells himself.  _We should have found a safe place before the sun got too high.  Now we must walk in the hottest part of the day, even though we are tired and hungry_.  In summer, their escape would have been impossible.

They follow the stream up the cleft, stopping to drink as much as they can.  They do not know when they will next find water.  Motioning to his sister to lie flat, Giancarlo climbs to the top of the slope of the gorge and, keeping as low as he can and covering his eyes with his hand, scans the countryside towards the town, trying to catch sight of the men he knows will be out looking for them.  He takes his time, alert to the slightest sign of movement.

Nothing so far.  Giancarlo returns to the foot of the slope he has just climbed.  Together they clamber up the other side, away from Cittagazze.

Two hours later, and their situation is becoming desperate.  Guilietta's feet are bleeding from walking without shoes, despite the soft grassy ground.  Giancarlo is finding it increasingly difficult to think straight.  The sun is behind them, which is a mercy, but its heat and glare are reflected back from the ground, making their eyes burn and their bare heads thump with pain.  To make things worse, there is very little cover here on the tops of the hills, yet Giancarlo knows that if they descend into the twisting, turning valleys they will quickly become lost.

'Can we stop.  Please?'

'No, Guili, we must go on.'

'But it hurts so…'

'Come here, now.'  She staggers towards him.  He knows that she is not far from collapse so, stepping forwards, he takes his sister in his arms and gently lifts her across his shoulders.

'Not far to go.'

'Really?'

'Yes, not far.  Try to sleep.'  The girl weighs next to nothing, it seems, but he knows that she will soon become an impossible burden as he weakens under the onslaught of heat, fatigue and hunger.

'Not far.'

_Colombo, Sri Lanka_

'Oh Christ!'

This unexpected profanity wakes Mary Malone, who is startled, but not altogether surprised, to find that she is not in her own room, nor her own bed.  _Let's see, who _did_ I end up with?_ she thinks and unwisely lifts her head from the pillow.

'Ouch!'  This is going to be one hell of a hangover. It was, after all, one hell of a party.  She turns to her companion, a middle-aged man whose hair appears to have deserted the top of his head under the malign influence of gravity and landed on his chest.  Who is it?  Peter?  Jim? That nice chemist from San Diego?

_Oh, no.  Oh shit!_  It's Roger.  Roger the Dodger.  Professor Roger Dexter, of the University of Liverpool, and the most notorious philanderer on the conference circuit.  How on earth could she have let this happen?

'Hi, babycakes,' pronounces Roger, in what he probably believes to be a low, sexy drawl.

'Roger!  I can't believe my luck!'  _That is certainly true…_

'How do you feel, gorgeous?'

'Terrible!'

'That was some party, huh?' _Hell's teeth, is this man for real?_ 'I feel great!'

'Then why are you holding your head in both hands?'

'Thinking.  Remembering you, last night.'

'Oh give it a rest!'

'You didn't.'  True enough.  Mary is discovering aches and sore bits that shouldn't be there.  _We must have been pretty energetic last night!  _'Get me a cup of tea, would you?'

'Just a mo.' Roger climbs out of bed, hastily dons a towelling dressing gown, and heads for the bathroom.  _So it's up to me, is it?_  thinks Mary, but is in no mood to argue.  She throws a spare dressing gown over herself, lurches over to the table where the hospitality tray is and switches on the kettle.  The tea will be foul – tea-bags and powdered milk – but right now anything warm and wet will do.  When Roger eventually returns, hair carefully combed over his bald patch, she hands him a cup and he slurps it gratefully.

'Good in bed, and makes a decent cup of tea too.  Mary – I think it's love!'

'Stuff it, Roger!'  Mary fends off a hand which is trying to tug at the belt of her dressing gown.  _The old goat!_  Still, it's flattering, receiving this sort of attention at her age.  Even if it's only from Roger the Dodger.

They sit together on the bed, sipping at their tea and trying to avoid making any sudden movements.  How many clubs did they visit?  And how many vodka-and-tonics did she drink?  Mary suspects that she would rather not know the answers to those questions.  She can vaguely remember demonstrating the moves of the Funky Chicken to a group of postgraduate students who weren't born when Rufus Thomas was at the height of his fame.  It went down quite well, she seems to recall.

Then there was a taxi back to the hotel, and Roger Dexter with her in the back seat, and more drinks in the bar, and the blatant pass that she was inclined to laugh off but was also, in an odd way, welcome too, and staggering up the stairs to the first floor and into Roger's room and her discovery that the things that were whispered about his, er, proclivities, were all true…

What else?  Oh yes, Will called.  And she said she'd do a bit of research for him.  Well.  She could pick up her phone and google for the information he needs, but that would only be _public_ information.  Perhaps she can get something more out of this casual encounter.  After all, Roger Dexter holds the Chair of Materials Science at Liverpool, and hers is most definitely a materials science question.

_I'd better look coy when I ask this_, she thinks.

'Roger?'

'Yes, babe?  Ready for more?'

_This is just not possible!  Will, you owe me a big one for this!_

'Just a minute, tiger!'

'Why wait?'

Mary bows to the inevitable.  Later, as they lie sweatily entangled on the bed, she finally gets to ask her question.

'Roger?'

'Yes, sweetums?'

'Tell me, ooof!  Stop it!  Be serious for a moment!  Do you know anyone in the UK who's making significant quantities of buckminsterfullerene?'

_Oxford_

Dream, and Imagination.  Imagination, and Dream.  They are siblings; they walk hand in hand, they breathe the same air.  They share the same secrets.

Will Parry, asleep in his Oxford flat, treads the path of Dream, guided by the power of Imagination, following the trail the angels have blazed for him.  And in that other Oxford, Lizzie Boreal, Lyra Belacqua's half-sister, is found in REM sleep and stirs, her lips subvocalising the words which only Will and Kirjava can hear.

Kirjava and Lizzie's serpent-daemon Parander are wide awake.  _The daemons are the key_.  The key to bridging the gap – microscopically narrow, yet infinitely wide – between the worlds.

'Lizzie, something happened today.  Something different.  Something important.'

'What was it?'

'It's the Knife – or something like the Knife.  There was a man brought in today who could easily have been been Knife-cut.'  Will describes Jack Farrell's injuries.  'I spoke to Mary, and she's going to look into it for me, but it may not be enough.  Lizzie, I've got a favour to beg of you.  Could you ask Lyra to…'

'Read the alethiometer?'

'Yes.  It might help.'

'You know it's terribly hard for her.'  _It used to be so beautifully, gracefully easy_.

'I know.  And I'd ask her myself, but…'

'I know.  Yes, I'll ask her.  You know who could tell us if it really was the Knife.'

'Giancarlo.  I know.  But we can't reach him.  I've not seen him for, oh, six years now.'

'I wonder how he is?'

_Near Cittagazze_

It is late afternoon when Giancarlo spots the wisp of smoke rising from behind a clump of pine trees to the north.  He stops, places the sleeping Guilietta carefully on the ground, and peers through the trees.  He can just make out the outline of a cottage.  He does not know whether the people in the cottage will help them or not, but he has little choice in the matter.  He covers his sister with her wrap and pushes through the trees to the waiting cottage.


	5. Oxford, Oxford, Colombo and Cittagazze

_Oxford_

'Honestly, Judy, if you don't ask him out soon, I will.'  Judy Beckley is chatting with her friend Miriam in the kitchen of their shared flat.

'It seems so clichéd.  That whole doctor/nurse thing.'

'Who cares?  He's gorgeous, isn't he?'

'In a funny kind of way, yes.'

'And you fancy him rotten, don't you?'

'It's not like that!'

'Yes it is.  It's bloody obvious.  Like I say, if you haven't asked him out by…' Miriam checks her watch, 'six o'clock tonight, I'm going to.  And don't say I haven't warned you!'

_She would, too_.  'All right, you win.  Now, are you making us some coffee, or what?'

_Oxford_

An unaccompanied woman may not occupy a table at Brown's, so Lizzie has to wait outside in St Giles.  Her daemon Parander is wrapped elegantly around her shoulders – in fact Lizzie is stylish and elegant from the top of her well-coiffed head to the toes of her fashionable shoes.  She sits on a bench and watches the people and traffic passing up and down the wide street.

'Come on!'  Parander is impatient, but they don't have very long to wait.  A figure appears in the middle distance, walking towards them.  It is Lizzie's half-sister, Lyra Belacqua.

Lyra is wearing, as is appropriate, academic dress – a long dark skirt, white blouse, full-length gown and mortarboard.  Her sensible shoes tap rhythmically on the pavement as she strides towards them; her tawny hair tied up in a bun at her neck, her daemon Pantalaimon trotting at her feet.

'Lyra!'

'Lizzie!'  They give each other's cheeks a light peck.

'Come in.  I've got us a table.'  They enter Brown's and take a seat in the window.  Lizzie orders tea for them both and Lyra asks for a currant bun, from which she feeds crumbs to Pantalaimon, who has a weakness for them.  It is not generally considered good manners to do this, but allowances are made for the eccentricities of the academics who form the greater part of Brown's clientele.

To begin with, their talk is light and inconsequential.  Lyra is cataloguing some early 16th century documents relating to the _Liber Angelorum_.  Lizzie has an active social life and the running of her late father's and uncle's estates and business interests to keep her occupied.  The superficial nature of their conversation is, as ever, intended to insulate them for a while from the matters which both unite and separate them.

They make a striking pair – the serious, bespectacled Lyra, sober and intense, and Lizzie, beautifully, expensively, dressed and the image of her departed mother, Marisa Coulter.

Sooner or later, Lizzie must come to the point.  'Lyra, I was talking to Will…'

'You were?'

'Yes, last night.'

'How is he?'

'Well.  Tired.'

'Thank you for telling me.'

They are silent.

'Look; he was asking a favour.'

'Yes?'  Lyra's face is flushed.

'Can you… could you do a reading for him?'

'A reading?  You mean, with the alethiometer?'

'Yes.  It's the Knife.  He's worried about it – he thinks there's something wrong.  Maybe someone has taken it or it's being misused.  Could you find out where it is?'

'And you'll let Will know what I discover?'

'Yes.  Lyra, he sounded worried.'

'All right.'  Abruptly, Lyra stands up.  'Thank you for the tea.  I'll let you know what the alethiometer tells me.'

'Goodbye, Lyra.'

'Goodbye, Lizzie.'

Lyra leaves Brown's and turns right, heading towards Jordan College.  She is blazing with anger.  She has no idea how she managed to keep her temper so long.

'You're not being fair on her.'

Lyra stops and stares at Pantalaimon.  'Fair?  What, exactly, do you mean by _fair_?'

'You know what I mean.  It's not her fault.'

'Why did it have to be _her_?'

'The angels never made any promises.  You know that.  Imagination – it worked, didn't it?'

'Yes, but it didn't work right.  It should have been me and Will; not her.'

Etiquette requires that passers-by ignore the sight of a person and her daemon quarrelling in public.  Lyra and Pantalaimon stand on the pavement isolated in a bubble of space and time.

It is the same old sore spot that Lyra has been scratching at for over five years.  The power of imagination did not work as she had hoped.  It linked Will Parry with her sister Lizzie, not her.  She can exchange messages with Will, but only via Lizzie and Parander.  Every time it happens, she feels humiliated.  Every time she feels, as she did at their forced separation at the Botanic Garden, the manifest unfairness of the world.  The Botanic Garden…

'We have a tutorial at two.'

'I know.  But we're going to the Garden _now_.'  Lyra's chin is jutting forward.  Pantalaimon knows better than to argue with her any further.

_Colombo, Sri Lanka_

Mary and Roger meet up at lunchtime.  It has been a busy morning, made harder by their headaches.  Nevertheless, some good work has been done.

Roger's ardour, Mary notes with some relief, has cooled.  Perhaps, she reflects, he has already lined up his next target.  Someone younger and blonder, no doubt.  Still, he comes up with the goods just the same.

'Try this lot,' he says, beaming contact and location details from his phone into hers.  'It's funny, really.'

'Funny, what?'

'Funny you coming all the way to Sri Lanka looking for fullerenes, when most of the UK research is being done just down the road from Oxford.'

'It is?'

'You'll see.'  He nods towards Mary's phone.  'It's only twenty minutes from you, along the A34.'

_Near Cittagazze_

Marco and Sophia are old and poor.  They own a few hectares of scrubby hillside which yields a meagre crop of olives and tomatoes, which Marco takes into Cittagazze every few weeks to exchange for rye flour and the occasional chicken or cheap cut of meat.  Apart from that, they grow some vegetables for their own consumption and graze a few goats on the thin grass that covers the slope above their cottage.

But, like poor people everywhere, they have a strict code of hospitality, and when Giancarlo Bellini, red-faced and exhausted, knocks on their door they do not turn him away, even when he tells them that he has a sister too, who needs help.

Together they carry Guilietta into the cottage.  Inside it is bare, as only the houses of the very poor are, with earthen floors and wooden shutters over the unglazed windows.  Sophia goes out to draw water from the stream which runs past the house and is, indeed, the only reason that it was built here at all.

'The poor thing!' exclaims Sophia, seeing how dehydrated and hungry the girl has become.  She takes her onto her lap and offers her sips of water from a clay cup, carefully, slowly at first, for too much water too soon will make her sick.  Guilietta, waking, sees Sophia's face above her and cries out 'Mama!'

Sophia, who had a daughter before the Spectres took her, feels a hand clutch at her heart.  Marco turns his face away and only Giancarlo sees his expression.  He gratefully accepts their offer of food and somewhere to sleep for the night.

Later, after a supper of ciabatta soaked in olive oil and rough red wine diluted with water from the stream, Giancarlo and Guiletta lie on straw mattresses in a little room under the eaves of the cottage, waiting for sleep to come.  Below them, they can hear the soft muttering of Marco and Sophia as they talk.  _Remembering their lost child_, thinks Giancarlo, seeing again the bleak sorrow in their faces at his sister's cry.  Marco had explained how it was, that their beautiful daughter, the joy of their lives, had strayed all unknowing into the path of a group of Spectres.

_And lost her soul_, Giancarlo said to himself, hearing the familiar sad story.  There is no family that he knows that did not, at one time or another, lose a loved one to the Spectres.  No family that is not haunted by the ghosts of what might have been.

Brother and sister fall asleep, and they never hear the visitors who knock peremptorily on the door, demanding information and offering both threats and promises.


	6. Oxford and Cittagazze

_The John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford_

Jack Farrell has come out of post-operative intensive care and is now on a general surgical ward.  He is sitting up in bed and watching the TV when Dr Parry comes round to see him.

He has a few questions – when will he be able to leave hospital, will his arm be OK – and Dr Parry is able to reassure him that everything is going well.  Jack points to his arm.

'How long will I have to carry this around with me?'

There is a plastic sleeve over the place where his arm has been sewn back on.  It's called the _Frankenstein Collar_ and it isolates the area where the nanotechs are hard at work, invisibly splicing together the severed nerves and muscle fibres.

'Another week or two.  Then the collar can come off and you'll be wearing an ordinary sling and plaster cast for a month or six weeks.  After that, I don't suppose your mother will be able to tell what's happened.'

'Or see the join.'  They laugh.

Two visitors arrive for Jack; a man and a woman.  His whole demeanour changes – he becomes anxious and less relaxed.

'Jack!' says the woman, and 'Thank you, Doctor,' from the man, dismissing Will.

Will walks thoughtfully down the middle of the ward towards the corridor beyond.  Those were the people who brought Jack in to A&E last Saturday.  Now; where has he seen them before?

_The Botanic Garden, Oxford_

Beyond the entrance to the Botanic Garden, where the tourists cluster around the greenhouses and the exhibition plants, there is an open grassy area, dotted with shrubs, which runs down to the river Isis.  In the middle of this area, discreetly preserved from all change and alteration by order of the Master of Jordan College, there is a tree with low-hanging branches, and by it a bench, which is subject to the same strict policy of immutability.

Lyra sits on the bench – on _her_ side – and takes the alethiometer out of the pouch which she always carries attached to a silken cord around her waist.  It glitters golden in the spring sunshine.

'You haven't got all the books with you.'

Even now, after all these years, she can't help thinking _I never used to need the books_.

'I'll see how far I can get without the books, Pan.'

There is no shame in using the books to decode the cryptic oracle of the alethiometer.  No shame at all; except that she is Lyra Belacqua, who once taught herself to read the alethiometer with no effort, who had once been able to read it instinctively, by the power of grace.  That grace which had been taken from her, along with so much else, in the dunes by the sea in the world of the Mulefa.  The ladders of meaning, which she had once skipped lightly up and down, flitting from rung to rung, speaking to the instrument directly, are now a steep and endless staircase, which she toils to climb, from which she readily falls, losing the chain of semantic connections and returning to the place from which she started, angry and frustrated.

She thinks _Will_ – but that is not at all the right place to start.  She cannot hope to make a successful reading if her mind is clouded by thoughts of Will.  She needs another connection, or signifier, for the Knife.  She chooses the Dolphin – for the Knife came from Cittagazze, the beautiful, decaying city by the sea.

_Near Cittagazze_

Giancarlo is woken late in the day, by the sun shining through a crack in the wall near to where he and his sister lie in the roof space of Marco and Sophia's cottage.  He sits up, feeling the stiff muscles in his legs, and clambers cautiously across the rafters to the gap in the floor and the ladder which leads down to the ground.  Sophia is there, but there is no sign of Marco.

Sophia wishes him _bongiorno_, and offers him goat's milk and bread.  Giancarlo eats and drinks gratefully.

'Your sister; she sleeps still?'

'Yes.  I will wake her soon.'

'We must talk first.  It is very important.'

'Why?'

'I will tell you.  First, tell me, is little Guilietta really your sister?'

'You mean, do we have the same parents?  No, my father adopted her.  Her mother… died.  You know.'

A pause.

'But she is your sister, just the same.'

'Yes, of course.'

'And you love each other.'

'Yes, of course.'

Sophia sighs.

'Of course.  Carlo, I must tell you that some men came to the house last night.  I think they were looking for you and Guili.'

'You didn't tell them about us?'

'No.  No, we didn't.  They were men from Ci'gazze and the east, and we have no regard for them.  It was fortunate that you and Guili were sleeping quietly above.

'Carlo, I have to tell you, and it shames me to say this, but I do not think that you can stay much longer.  Marco… we are poor, and they offered money, and I could see what he was thinking.  He left the house early this morning…'

Giancarlo rests his hand on hers.

'Mother, you have already helped us much more than we deserve.  I would not bring any more sorrow on this house than I have already.  Guili and I will go as soon as we can.'  And he turns to the ladder which leads to the roof.  Sophia stops him.

'Carlo, would you let me wake her again?  For Maria's sake?'

_The lost daughter_.  'Yes, Mother.'  And he steps outside the cottage and waits while Sophia slowly climbs the ladder to the roof and crouches looking at the sleeping Guilietta, who so closely resembles her own child. She stirs and looks up at Sophia, waking, and the beauty of her smile stabs Sophia's soul, wounding and healing her both.

'Mama!'

'My child!'

Outside, Giancarlo reflects on the Knife, how the Spectres that it let into the worlds from the outer darkness blighted so many lives, and he tries, and fails, to shake off the feeling that at least some of the blame for this rests on him.

_Remiel and I, we used the Knife only for good, only to save lives, to bring the Exiles home and restore balance to the worlds.  Those people would have died if we had not sought them out and rescued them, taking them back to their home worlds._

Sophia and Guilietta come down the ladder together and join Giancarlo outside.  Guilietta is wearing some old clothes and shoes which Sophia has given her and which must, at one time, have belonged to Maria.

'You should go soon.'  Guilietta looks up to Giancarlo.

'Can't we stay?  I like it here.'

'I'm sorry, sweetheart.  We would if we could.'  To Sophia:  'Where should we go?'

'Go north.  Go to the sea, to Siemione.  There you will find boats, and fishermen, who will take you away from here.  Look for a man called Demio – he is my cousin and will help you.

'Now, go!'  She gives Guilietta a drink of milk and a bread roll and hands a package to Giancarlo.  'There is bread and wine here.  Please, go!'

Sophia points north, to a gap in the hills.  'Over the pass and down to the sea.  There you will find Siemione and Demio.'

Giancarlo and Sophia kiss, and the woman clasps Guilietta longingly to herself for a minute or two.  Then they leave, and do not look back.

_Marco will beat her when he discovers what she has done_, thinks Giancarlo.  And Guilietta says, 'She was nice.  I wish we didn't have to leave so soon.'  

'So do I, sweetheart.  So do I.'

_Oxford_

'Episode Ten?  I didn't think you were a Star Wars fan!'

_Oh no!  I've blown it!_

'We could see something else if you like.'

Will turns to Judy, whose suggestion, while they were standing by the coffee machine, that they go out to see a film has come as a complete surprise to him.  Staff Nurse Beckley; not exactly pretty, but nice-looking.  More to her, somehow, than the other girls he's taken out.  A certain look in her eyes, like… No, not really.  Still, yes, he'd like to go and see a film with Judy, and he says so.

'Episode Ten would be fine.'

_Up yours, Miriam!_  'See you tonight?  By the main gate?'

'Sorry, no.  I'm on call tonight.  Would Wednesday be OK?'

_Damn!  I should have known that_.  'Great! Wednesday it is!'

'And may the Force be with you.'

'Live long and prosper.'

'That's Star Trek!'

_Oops!_  'Sorry…'

'Don't be.  And don't worry – I'm not a Trekkie.'

'That's a relief.'

'Bye now.'

'See you.'

_Result!_  Judy walks home with a certain spring in her step.  How is she to know what a simple date may lead to?


	7. Oxford, Siemione and Oxford

_Oxford_

It is one o'clock in the morning and Lyra Belacqua is still awake.  The alethiometer reading has not been going well; for a number of reasons.  Firstly, because it concerns Will and she is finding it hard to manage her feelings for him, and for her half-sister Lizzie.   _I should be making a life for myself.  There's the Republic to build!_  She cannot help her feelings of jealousy towards Lizzie, and she cannot help wondering about her mother.

Lizzie's close physical resemblance to their dead mother is too obvious to ignore and it has waked doubts and fears in Lyra's mind that she cannot shake off.  _Was it really me that Will loved?  Or did he, all along, desire the image of my mother that he saw in me?  _Every time she sees Lizzie the same questions rise up in her mind, choking her.  She knows she should not mind that Lizzie has become rich and powerful and a noted society beauty, while she is buried in obscurity, in dusty Jordan College.

_Will and me, _we_ made the difference.  It was _our_ love that stopped the Dust-flow and _our_ sacrifice that saved the worlds.  So why is it that _she_ is the one who talks directly to Will while I have to be content with second-hand messages, passed via _her_?_

There is another thing too.  _They slept together.  I know it_.

Pantalaimon: 'Stop it.  You won't help Will, thinking like this.'

Lyra: 'I know.'  She takes off her glasses, placing them carefully on the book-strewn table in front of her.  Jordan College is proud of its traditions; and they do not extend to the fitting of anbaric lighting in the rooms of mere postgraduate students.  Years of closely studying the Books in dim light have taken their toll on Lyra's eyesight.  'I'm nearly there.'  She points to a pile of notes and references by her side.  She has to take notes as the reading progresses or she will lose her way and have to start again from the beginning.

The other reason that the reading has been so hard is the vague nature of the request.  There are a larger number of variables than she usually has to deal with.  Simple enquiries, like _Is it worth digging for gold in Cirencester?_ or _Is this man guilty of fraud?_ are comparatively easy to answer.  But the Knife is in another world…  She takes up her pen again, with a sigh.

Two hours later, three o'clock in the morning, and she has her answers.  She writes a note to Lizzie:

Dear Lizzie,

Here are the answers the alethiometer gave:

_The Knife is on the move_

_The girl's mother died_

_Look for the Ring_

I hope they help.

Best wishes,

Lyra

She takes the letter down to the porter's lodge and leaves it in the outgoing pigeonhole.  Lizzie will receive it with her morning post.

_The hills above Siemione_

Guilietta's spirits are high as she and her brother walk on the springy grass in the hills above the cottage where they spent the night.  Seeing Sophia's face above her as she woke brought back memories of her own mother that had lain half-forgotten in her memory for four years.  The soft voice singing a lullaby as she slipped into sleep, the warmth of her breast resting against her cheek, the safety, the love.  She chatters gaily to Giancarlo – will they live in a house by the sea, will there be boats they can go fishing out in, will they see Papa soon, will she have to go to school?

Giancarlo answers her questions in a half-detached, abstracted manner.  He is glad to see his sister in good spirits, but he is feeling the weight of his responsibilities:

For Guili – she is so young, so vulnerable and so easily hurt.

For the Knife – how long can he keep it safe?  He is wearing its sheath inside his waistband, concealed, he hopes, from casual view.  He knows, however, that their descriptions must have been spread around the surrounding area by the men who are following him and his sister.  He cannot believe that the cottage was not being watched, and anyway, he knows that they have at the most three or four hour's lead, for he is sure that Marco will not hesitate to inform on them.

For their future – what will they do?  The best he can think of at the moment is that they should ask a fisherman to take them in his boat to another country, where they may be safe for a while.

And his talk with Marco and Sophia last night and this morning has started another question insistently and inexorably repeating in his mind.  _Guili's mother.  Why did she die?_

It is an old question, which he has, over the years, pushed to the back of his mind as being just one more of the world's unanswerable mysteries.  It has come back to him now, with increased significance. The numbers still don't add up, no matter how he tries.  He rehearses them over and over:

Sophia's daughter Maria was killed by the Spectres fifteen years ago, she said.  That was in the time before he became the Knife-bearer; in fact before his predecessor Will Parry had care of it.  So no blame could attach to him, or Will, for opening the window which created the Spectre that took Maria's mind, ending her life.

Ten years ago, he was given the Task of using the Knife to make new openings between the worlds so that the people who had been stranded far from their homes when the angels closed the windows after the Fall of Metatron could be saved.  He, his father, and the angel Remiel had travelled from world to world, following up a rumour here and a sighting there, or information from the angels themselves, and offering each of the Exiles the opportunity of going back to their own world.  Most had accepted the offer with great relief; they were dying, away from the place where their daemons – visible or not – had first come to life.  Some had accepted the price of staying in their adopted homes and decided to end their lives where they were.  But, as the months passed there were fewer and fewer Exiles left and, five years ago, the Task was ended and the Knife put aside.  There had been no news of any estranged person for over six months.

Every time that Giancarlo had opened a window with the Knife, a Spectre had been created.  Every time, the angel Remiel had gone to the world where the Spectre had appeared – usually in the world of Cittagazze where the Knife was created – and extinguished it.  Each window had been opened for the least time possible.  _We obeyed the Laws of the Knife.  We did all we could to mitigate the damage it did_, thinks Giancarlo.  But… Guili's mother was killed by a Spectre, just the same.  Had Remiel failed to destroy all the Spectres the Knife admitted into the worlds?  Had more than one – perhaps hundreds – been let in every time he cut an opening, and had one or two escaped the angel's notice?

_Am I responsible, despite the care we took and all our good intentions, for killing Guili's mother?_  The thought has haunted him for years.  Together with another one, which countervails against it, although it always seems to him as if he is trying to find a way to duck out of facing up to his own guilt.  Guilietta's mother was killed four years ago.  He last used the Knife to cut a window five years ago.  How could it be his fault?  The Spectre could have been hiding for who knows how long – ten years or more.  _But the angels said they would deal with the Spectres.  Will told me.  It could still be one of his, not mine.  But it might not be._

Argument and counter-argument spin fruitlessly around in his head, torturing him and leading nowhere.   He tries his best to put them out of his mind and concentrate on finding the best path through the pass in the hills which leads down to the village of Siemione and, he hopes, safety.

_Oxford_

'Discharged?  You have to be joking!'  Dr Parry turns on the ward sister.  'Who authorised this?'

'Nobody.  He discharged himself.'

'He did what?  He can't do that.  He's still wearing a nano-collar.'

'They said they'd return it.  Doctor, there wasn't anything I could do.'

_That's put the kibosh on it._  Will had come down to the general surgical ward to carry on the conversation with Jack Farrell which was interrupted the day before.  _There is something very wrong here_.

'What about his care?'

'They said they were taking him to a private medical facility'

'Who? Where?'

'They didn't say.'

'And the f-collar?  What about that?  They cost a fortune, and they come out of our budget!'

'They left a cheque.  For ten thousand euros.'

'How much?  Who signed it? Have you got it?'

'I don't know.  I sent it down to the bursar's office.'

Will gives up.  His patient has disappeared, leaving only a name which may, for all he knows, be false.

_Now what?_

Will is on duty all evening again, while Judy stays in and, under Miriam's instruction, tries to choose clothes to wear for her night out with Will tomorrow.

_Why am I behaving like a silly schoolgirl on her first date?_  After all, he's only a man, even if he's a very nice one.  Somewhere in her modest wardrobe must be an outfit that will strike the correct balance between, on one hand, dowdiness (beige cardigan, tweed skirt) and on the other making her look as if she's going to a tarts and vicars fancy-dress party.

That night, Will has lucid dreams, or appears to do so, and in the morning there is a message on his TV screen, and Kirjava is wearing an expression whose smugness is excessive, even for a cat:

_The Knife is on the move_

_The girl's mother died_

_Look for the Ring_

_Love, Lizzie_

'Smartarse daemon!  Did you do this?'

'I thought it would be a good idea to write it down. I sent it to Mary, too.  She'll see it when she next checks her phone.'

Will takes a look at his.  Mary is offline, presumably in a conference session.  She has sent him a list of URLs overnight, but he has no time to follow them up now.

As he gets ready to leave for the John Radcliffe Hospital, Will and Kirjava talk about the message.

'We knew that something was happening with the Knife.'

'Yes, that's plain enough.  But who is the girl?'

'Lyra?  Lizzie?'

'Their mother certainly died.  At least I suppose she did.  But Lyra would have said if it meant her.  She'd have said _My mother died_, and she'd have said what it meant.'

'And _Look for the Ring_?'

'"One Ring to rule them all"?'

'What?'

'Tolkien.  The One Ring.'

'She can't mean that.  There was no _Lord of the Rings_ in Lyra's world.'

'No – it would have been burnt as heresy!'

Kirjava stays at home while Will sets off for the hospital.  There are unsolved mysteries, and she wonders whether they are, in fact, soluble and where the solutions may lead.


	8. Colombo, Siemione and Oxford

_Colombo, Sri Lanka_

Mary Malone studies the pattern the yarrow stalks have made on the bed.  There are many ways of divining information.  Lyra has the alethiometer.  Anyone who has a phone can google for it.  And for her, there is the I Ching.

_There is danger_

_You can help_

'How on earth am I supposed to do that when I'm stuck here?' she asks aloud, while her bird-daemon stands one-legged on the TV on the other side of her hotel room, regarding her quizzically.

_Siemione_

It is quite impossible for strangers to enter a village – any village, anywhere in all the infinite number of worlds which comprise the multiverse – without being the subjects of intense curiosity among its inhabitants.  When Giancarlo and Guilietta first appear in the cleft in the hills above Siemione, following the stream which, widening as it goes, gives fresh water to its people and is the reason that it exists, for without the sandy beach, wide foreshore and natural harbour which the stream created, nobody would have settled there, the informal telegraph springs into action, signalling their approach to anyone who is interested.

As they reach the low sea-wall in front of the row of small houses which make up the main street of Siemione a group of men come up to them.  One, bigger than the rest and clearly their leader, steps forward and speaks to Giancarlo.

'Bongiorno, signore.'

'Good day to you.'

'Have you come far today?'

'Over the hills.'  Giancarlo points to the north, in the opposite direction to Cittagazze.  He hopes that this lie will serve and that they were not observed by a shepherd as they approached from the south.  'Not far.'

'Which town do you come from?'

_Think carefully.  Choose somewhere large, where many people live and they do not all know each other._

'Monteligorne.'  _That will do._

'Monteligorne, eh?  Perhaps you know my cousin Leo Grazze?  In the Via delle Viti?'

_This must be a trap.  There is probably no such street._

'No, I've never met him.  I'm looking for a man called Demio.  He is the cousin of my Aunt Sophia, who lives over there.'  Giancarlo points vaguely to the south. 

'Demio?'  The man scratches his chin.

'Yes.  In her letter, Aunt Sophia said that he would guide us to her.  We, my sister and me, we're going to visit her.'

'Her letter?'  The man's face darkens and he looks suspicious.  'Since when did Sophia Vicenze write letters?  She cannot read, let alone write.'

_Be very careful now…_

'I don't know.  Perhaps Uncle Marco wrote it for her.  Perhaps someone else did.  Am I in the right place?  They told me that I would find a man called Demio in Siemione who would guide us to Aunt Sophia's house.'

'I am Demio Vicenze.'  A short man elbows his way to the front of the group.  'Who are you?'

'I am Mario Carina.  This is my sister, Eva.'

'I did not know that Cousin Sophia had a nephew and niece.  When did you last see Marco and Sophia?'

'Years ago.  We stayed at their house all summer and looked after the goats.'  Giancarlo describes a holiday in the hills, bathing in the stream, climbing the trees, visiting Cittagazze.  His story's mixture of accurate detail and imaginative fantasy convinces Demio, who relaxes and smiles.

'It is a beautiful place, where they live.  But they are poor, as you would not have seen, then, when you were younger.  Here,' and he waves his hand, taking in the village and the sea, 'we have the sea and the fishing, and we can live, but on the land it is hard.

'Come.  Today the wind blows from the west,' Demio points straight out to sea, 'and there is no fishing.  Do they know how to mend nets, in Monteligorne?'

'Yes, of course.'  Every child of Cittagazze is taught to mend nets.

'Then we will sit on the sand and mend nets.'

There is a group of fishing boats drawn up on the beach below the wall in the late afternoon sun.  They sit on the sand, next to Demio's boat _Gabbiano_ and patch and re-knot the broken threads of the nets which are his livelihood.

_The nets are old and rotted.  They should be replaced.  But where are the new ones to come from?_  Giancarlo asks himself.  _The Knife.  It all comes down to the Knife._

Demio and his wife live in one of the whitewashed houses which face out to sea towards the setting sun.  She makes Giancarlo and Guilietta welcome and shows them the small room with its two palliasses where they will sleep tonight.  'If the wind blows offshore tomorrow Demio will go fishing and I will take you to Cousin Sophia's.  If not, we will all go.  I have not seen Sophia or Marco for many years.'  Her sun-browned face crinkles with smiles.  'They are good people.'

'But sad.'

'Yes, Mario.  We are all sad, these days.  One day, perhaps, a time will come when we will not need to be so unhappy.'

Tonight, in honour of their visit, Demio tells them, they will not eat at home, but in the house of the Capo, the man who questioned them when they first entered Siemione.

'It is an honour.  He is a great man, and his house is very splendid.'

To Giancarlo, who has lived in Cittagazze and London, the Capo's house, which stands alone at the end of the row of houses is not so very grand and neither is the Capo himself, who has clearly gained his position as headman of the village more by the use of his fists than through any innate qualities of leadership.  

The Capo sits at the head of a long table, with his sons by him and his wife and daughters serve food to them all.  Demio and his wife are very deferential towards them, as are the other villagers who have gathered together for this feast.

The food is put on the table.  There are grilled sardines and monkfish, with a ratatouille of aubergines, tomatoes, olives and peppers, golden pan-baked bread and white wine.  Giancarlo is ready to start eating, when Demio nudges him and tells him to wait.

'We must give thanks for our food.'

The Capo stands and raises his hands above his broad shoulders.  The other villagers bow forward over the table.  Giancarlo and Guilietta follow their example.

'Let us bless the Angels who have provided for us.

'Bless and thank the Angel Of The Sea, who has sent the silver fishes to our nets, that we may eat and be satisfied; and lift our voices in praise to him.'

'Grazie, elogiarlo,' the villagers respond.

'Bless and thank the Angel Of The Sky, who has sent the sun and the rain, that we may drink and be satisfied; and lift our voices in praise to him.'

'Grazie, elogiarlo.'

'Bless and thank the Angel Of The Land, who has sent the grains and the vines, that we may eat and drink and be satisfied; and lift our voices in praise to him.'

'Grazie, elogiarlo.'

'Bless and thank the Angel Of Our Hearts, who has made us to know him; and lift our voices in praise to him.'

'Grazie, elogiarlo.'

Giancarlo sees one of the Capo's sons get up and go to the end of the room, behind his father.  At a signal, he draws a curtain aside, which Giancarlo had supposed to cover a window.

'And let us bless, praise, honour and mourn our Image and our Pride, our Sorrow and our Joy.'

'Tullio!' a man sitting to Guilietta's right cries out.

'Tullio!  Our Tullio!' sobs a woman near the back of the room.

'Praise him.  Praise Tullio!'  Voices are speaking softly from all sides.

_What is this?_  Looking up, Giancarlo sees what the curtain has been hiding.

The Knife.

Or, rather, a crude wooden carving of the Subtle Knife of the Torre degli Angeli, painted silver.  All around him, the villagers are standing, bowing towards the Knife's image, crying out in rapture:

'Tullio, save us!'

'Tullio, joy of my heart!'

'Be with us!'

The Capo motions for silence.  'All praise, all honour, all joy, all reverence to our Holy Lord, our Saviour, our Prophet; Saint Tullio, Martyr and Apostle.'

'Until the Holy Knife be restored,' the people murmur.

'Until the Knife be restored to its Holy Purpose.'

And Giancarlo feels that the eyes of the whole village are upon him, and that the Capo can see straight through to his soul, and knows its deceptions, and despises them, and that the Knife, hidden in his waistband, is as utterly visible as if he had taken it out and held it above his head and cried out aloud, 'Here is the Knife!  And here am I, Giancarlo Bellini, its Bearer!'

The moment passes.  The curtain is drawn over the image and the people relax, sit down and begin to eat.

'Was that not magnificent?' Demio asks Giancarlo.

'I have never seen anything so… fine.'

'We are the First.  We are the Founders of the Holy Church of St Tullio of the Knife.'

'Saint Tullio the Martyr?'

'Yes.  Saint Tullio, who will return to us, bearing the Knife and bringing its great gifts to us.'

Giancarlo falls silent and eats.  He has been shaken by the fervour of these people, and he is fearful too.  He is thankful that he has not asked Demio to take Guilietta and him away in his boat or divulged the truth about his and his sister's real identities.

The fish are delicious and Giancarlo and his sister are hungry.  Giancarlo drinks the wine that is offered to him, and, as the evening progresses, becomes comfortable and relaxed.  He notices, but attaches no importance to the fact, that the Capo leaves the room at one point for a few minutes, but supposes that he has simply gone out to relieve himself.  There is goat's cheese to follow, and more wine.  

Guilietta sees that her brother is enjoying himself, although she wishes that he would not drink so much, as he is bound to feel sick in the morning.  She sees the other villagers take their leave, but is surprised when Demio and his wife go, and they do not go too.  She drifts in and out of sleep – it is late, and they have been walking all day, and the room is smoky.  Giancarlo is smoking one of the Capo's pipes; something which she has never seen him do before.  The fumes which fill the room take hold of her, making her dizzy and confused, and she slips into unconsciousness.

Then there is a sequence of images, glimpsed between blackouts, and words which stand out clearly above the buzzing which fills her head.  Two men, whom she has not seen before, standing with the headman.  'That's him.'

_Blank_.

Giancarlo with netting looped around his arms.  Why isn't he fighting them?  'Let's take it now.'  'No.  It is holy.  Wait for the One.'

_Blank_.

Two men have taken her by the legs and shoulders and she is being carried into a dark place.  She tries to wriggle out of their grip, but she seems to be paralysed. She cannot move, just as in a nightmare. She tries to call _Help!_ but her voice dies in her throat.

_Blank_.

_Oxford_

The bus drops Judy Beckley outside the multiplex.  The garish interior smells of carpet cleaner and popcorn, sickly and antiseptic.  Will is there, waiting for her.

'Judy!  Great!  You look nice!'

_Phew!_

'Come on, then.  I've got us Cokes and candyfloss and numbered seats.'

'At the back?'  _Oh yes?_

'At the back.  You don't want to be kicked to death by overexcited kids, do you?'

'No, I do not.  Thank you.'  Will takes Judy's shoulder and guides her into Screen One.     


	9. Oxford and Siemione

_Culham, near Abingdon, Oxon_

'And you said nothing?'

'Nothing at all!'

'You're sure about that?'

'Yes!  Please stop!'

'When we're ready.  Did you speak to the doctor?'

'Only once.  Then you turned up.'

'And you are positively absolutely sure that you said nothing about… all this.'

'Yes.  I'm sure.'

'Leave him.'  The man releases Jack Farrell's neck.  

The man and woman walk down the corridor together.

'He's probably telling the truth.'

'He's got no reason not to.'

'True.  Why did it have to be him?'

'Parry?  I don't know.  Just bloody awful bad luck, I suppose.'

'Did he spot us?'

'I don't know.  I don't think so.'

'We ought to do something about him.'

'What are we going to do?  For fuck's sake, he's a bloody _doctor_!'

_Oxford_

'That was…'

'Absolutely…'

'The most…'

'Dreadful…'

'Appalling…'

'Incredible…'

'Utter and complete…'

'Totally…'

'Disgusting…'

'Waste of time…'

'That I…'

'Have ever seen!'

Will and Judy have collapsed against each other in the car park.  They lean against Will's car, gasping for breath.

'I'm sorry!  I really am!'  Judy can scarcely put three words together, she is laughing so hard.

'You will be!'  Will does his best Wookie impression, which would, if he were a foot taller and covered in orange-brown fur, be quite convincing.  Parents hurrying their children home are careful to cross to the other side of the car park and avoid the two, no doubt stoned, lunatics who are giggling helplessly at each other.

'Let's get out of this madhouse.  Fancy a coffee?'

They get back somehow, although there is a close call when Will remembers David Hyde Pierce's impersonation of a Jedi Master and goes the wrong way around the railway station.

_And I thought this was turning out to be a disaster!  But, thank God, he's actually got a sense of humour._  Judy can feel herself melting inside as she takes a sneaky sideways look at Will from the passenger seat of his car.

They park outside Will's flat and go inside.

'What a beautiful cat!'  And so it is, indigo-black with soft, silky, fur.  Judy gathers Kirjava up into her arms.

Will is startled, but hides it well.  'Ah, I see you're going to get on with Kirjava.'  _How did Judy see her_?

'Kirjava? What an unusual name! Is she Norwegian or Finnish or something?'

'Every bit as English as me, as far as I know.  Why don't you go into the sitting-room?  I'll grind the beans.'

_Damn.  No sofa._  Disappointed, Judy takes one of the fireside armchairs and waits for Will, with Kirjava purring on her lap.  There is already a light on in the room, or so it seems, shining golden-yellow in one corner.

Will comes in with two mugs of coffee on a small tray.  He reaches for the light switch, then turns and looks into the illuminated corner.  He freezes rigid for a moment, and carefully places the tray on the floor.

'Remiel?  Is that you?'

_Siemione_

Giancarlo wakes, and wishes he hadn't.  His head aches abominably, there is a dull pain in his side, and he has no feeling in his arms and feet, which are tightly bound.

_Betrayed!  _The thought gnaws at him._  I trusted these people, and they were using me and laughing at me all the time._

What will happen now?  Probably he will be taken back to Cittagazze, and Signore Fratelli and the other man will force him to use the Knife. They will not threaten him personally, of course.  They will bully his father, or his aunt, or his friends.  They will hurt them until he agrees to do as they tell him.  He feels sick at this thought, and realises that he has been sick already and that there is a pool of vomit on the ground next to him.

_They will hurt Guili._

His sister is lying on the other side of the sandy floor of the hut in which they have been imprisoned.  Like him, her arms and feet have been bound together. He can hear her breathing in the half-darkness.  It must be early morning outside.

He still has the Knife, in its sheath by his side.

That makes sense.  It is a holy object and they would not dare to touch it.  Perhaps there is hope for them after all, but it is the very last hope they have, and he must search his conscience for any possible alternative.

'Guili?'

'Carlo?'

'Guili, are you all right?'

'Yes, Carlo, but my arms hurt.  They are tied up very tight.'

'Guili, listen.  We are in terrible danger.  You must do exactly what I tell you if we are to get away from here.'

'Is it the bad men again?  The ones who were hitting Papa?'

_She saw that!_  'Yes, sweetheart, it's them.'

'What must I do?'

'Good girl!  Can you crawl over to me?'

Guilietta wriggles snake-like across the floor to her brother.  'Is this right?'

'Yes.  Look, I want you to get the Knife out of its sheath.'

'How can I do that?  They tied my arms up.'

'Use your teeth.'  Giancarlo bends himself at the waist as he lies.  'Bite on my shirt and pull it out of my trousers.  Here, on this side.'

'Yes, I see.'  Guilietta twists herself around until she can reach Giancarlo's waistband with her mouth.  Her sharp teeth grip on the fabric of his shirt and steadily, inch by inch, with her tugging and Giancarlo moving to help, it is pulled out of the way revealing the Knife in its sheath, next to his body.

'Well done!  Can you see a strap?'

'Where?'

'Around the handle.  There's a strap holding the Knife in its sheath.  To stop it slipping out.'

'No…  Yes, I see it.'

'You'll have to tug at the strap.  It goes all the way round.  Use your teeth again.'

It is agonisingly slow.  Giancarlo has always tied the strap tightly, to avoid any chance that the deadly blade will accidentally come out.  After ten painful minutes it is still only slightly loose.  The light from outside is becoming brighter – sunrise is coming.  The Capo, or his men, may turn up at any time to check on them.

At last, and the first rays of the sun are now sliding through the gaps in the wall, the strap is free.

'Now Guili, this is the most dangerous part.  I want you to grip the end of the handle with your teeth and pull the Knife straight out.  As soon as it is free from the sheath, turn away from me and drop it onto the ground.  _Don't touch the blade_.  Drop it away from you.'

'Carlo, I'm frightened.'  There is blood around her mouth, from pulling and biting at the strap.

'Don't be.  Just pull steadily at it.'

Guilietta nods.  Giancarlo sits up and bends forward, so that the handle of the Knife stands clear of his body.  Guilietta manoeuvres her way around behind him and kneels towards his waist.  Her teeth close around the end of the handle.

Slowly; slowly and with infinite care, she pulls the Knife out of its sheath.  She turns towards the wall on her knees, not daring to breathe, ready to drop the Knife from her mouth onto the floor.  But she is tired, and she is tense and shaking, and the weapon slips from her grip too soon and falls between her legs, cutting into her left thigh.

Guilietta screams and falls back, away from the lethal edge.  Blood is running down her leg.

'Guili!'  Giancarlo's whisper is tense, desperate. _How deep is the wound?_

'I'm… I'm all right, Carlo.'  Giancarlo looks over towards her.  Her face is deathly pale with shock.  The pain of the Knife-cut has not yet hit her, but when it does it will be terrible. The Knife itself is standing with its point embedded in the ground.  There are about four inches of blade visible between the hilt and the sand.

_Enough._

'Guili, one more thing and then we can get away from here.  I'm going to try to use the Knife to cut through this netting they've tied us up with.  Can you tell me where to put my hands so I don't get hurt by it?'

'I… I'll try.'  Guilietta's voice is shaky.

Giancarlo moves cautiously towards the Knife.  Guided by Guilietta, he puts his wrists by the blade.  _One slip now and I will lose a hand.  Or both hands._

The first few strands of netting part as he rests them against the edge.  Then more, and, remembering how old and rotten the nets were that he and Guillietta and the traitor Demio mended the previous afternoon, he twists hard on his wrists, feeling the threads snap.  As his hands become free, he hears voices coming from outside the hut.

'I heard something, I tell you.'

'It was a seagull, that's all.'

'I don't care.  I'm going in to check on them.'

'But it is a holy place, consecrated to Saint Tullio.'

'Get the key, sciocco!'

Now there are no choices left.  Giancarlo can cut their way out of the hut very easily now, but the men will be back in a few minutes.  Guilietta is injured – how badly he cannot tell – so they cannot run away.  There is only one thing left that he can do. He takes the Knife in his right hand and cuts away his and Guilietta's remaining bonds.  Then, for the first time in more than five years he holds it high, probing at the air, looking for a place in the warp and weft of the fabric of the worlds where he can find the node he seeks.

_Snick._


	10. Oxford

_Oxford_

Judy takes hold of the dash of the VW Golf as Will drives furiously south and west on the Oxford Ring Road.  The blue lamp that she has fixed to the roof of the car flashes above them, the hazard lights are on, and Will is using his horn to shoo stray traffic from their path.

'Where are we going?'

Will is concentrating hard on his driving.  'Blackbird Leys.'

_Oh God._  Blackbird Leys is not a part of Oxford that Judy would care to visit in broad daylight, let alone late at night.  It is a run-down housing estate, originally built for the workers at the long-closed Morris car factory, but now full of car-jackers, drug-abusers and their suppliers.  The people who live there will have no respect for their blue lamp – in fact it will mark them out as a target.

_They stone the ambulances here_, thinks Judy.  _What will they do to us?_

'Who the fuck are you?'  The boy is only thirteen, but he looks older.  The two girls with him can be no more than eleven.  One, sluttish in ripped tee shirt and shorts, jerks her head towards Giancarlo.

''E's got a knife, Jack.'  She spits at her feet.  'Thinks 'e's hard.'

'Hard fucker, are you?'  The boy grins, gap-toothed.  'You going to show me?'  There is a bright flicker of metal around his left hand and suddenly he is holding a blade, eight inches long and wickedly notched.

_Where are we?  How can this have happened?_  Giancarlo tries to come to terms with their situation.  Has the Knife worked wrong?  Did the window he cut lead to a different world from the one he intended?  They had come through the dawn-lit window in their own world into the darkness of this one, and been immediately disoriented by their strange surroundings.  This world is like the one where he used to live with his father, but it is spoiled, corrupted and ruined.

_Why is it so dark?_  A half-moon had allowed him to see the houses to the left and right of them, but the street in between was unlit.  There were cars parked by the side of the road, but many of them looked abandoned, their windows broken and their headlights missing.  Then, in the distance, he had seen the yellow glow of a solitary sodium lamp and followed it.  Where there was light, there must be people.

They were completely unprepared for the hostility of the children they met, hanging about under the streetlight.  He is carrying a weapon whose powers are beyond the understanding of the kids who are threatening him and Guilietta, but how can he use it to save his sister and him without killing or at least maiming their attackers?

'I only want to know where we are,' he appeals to the kids.  'We're looking for a hospital.  My sister's hurt.'  Guilietta is clinging to him, the blood from the Knife-cut running down from her thigh.

'What's all that blood on her leg?  How do we know you didn't just rape her, eh?' says the other girl.

'Bastard rapist!  Take him down, Jack.  We don't want no fuckin' paedos here.'

The boy smiles humourlessly and switches his blade from hand to hand, lightning fast.

'I'm gonna cut you.'  He lunges forward.  Guilietta is holding on to him tightly, and Giancarlo cannot move fast enough, and his left arm is slashed by the boy's knife.  Jack passes the blade from hand to hand again.  'Come on then, you fucking wanker.  You gonna use that thing, arsehole?'  He points to the Knife.

_I could cut another window, but they would follow us through it.  I could kill them, but that would make me a murderer._

Giancarlo decides that he must try to use the Knife with sufficient finesse to frighten the street kids off without crippling them permanently, and he gently pushes Guilietta away from him.

'Wait here, mia cara.  I will not harm them any more than I must.'

'Come on!'  The boy beckons him mockingly with both hands.  Giancarlo advances towards him, Knife raised high.  He is no practised knife-fighter, who would hold his weapon low and pointing up, ready to slide between the ribs of his opponent and into his heart.

Jack lunges forward, and Giancarlo dodges to the right, just fast enough.  He swings the Knife down, but too late, too slow, to keep up with his opponent's street-honed reflexes.  Jack laughs at his clumsiness, and leaps forward again.  Again, Giancarlo jerks out of the way just in time, but not quickly enough to escape the boy's return downstroke.  The blade slices down his left side and the red blood spurts out, soaking into his clothes.  Pain lashes at Giancarlo, twisting his body in a scream of agony.

Giancarlo realises – too late – that he has made a fatal mistake in taking this boy on.  Jack is a hardened street fighter.  He is terrifyingly quick and he has one overwhelming advantage over Giancarlo.

He does not care how much he hurts him.

Giancarlo grits his teeth, fighting the pain, and stands upright, sweeping the Subtle Knife in front of him in a lethal arc of metal, the air singing as it passes.

'Nice knife, wanker.  Fuckin' shame you can't use it.'  The boy lunges forward and downwards next to Giancarlo's legs, slashing at them as he passes.  He falls to his knees and the boy, leaping to his feet, kicks him in the back, knocking him to the ground.  He lies dazed and unmoving on the concrete pavement.

'Finish the bastard off, Jacko.'  The first girl kicks him hard in the groin with her square-toed shoes.  Through a haze of pain he can hear Guilietta screaming in a faint high-pitched wail.  _Is this the way it's all going to end?_

The Golf's tyres squeal as it rounds the turn into the Blackbird Leys spine road.  Most of the streetlights do not work here; either they have been shot out or their power has been stolen to work the TVs and videos in the boarded-up houses nearby.  Will switches his headlights to high beam and keeps his eyes open for the yellow shimmer of the angel Remiel who flies ahead of him and Judy, leading the way.

'Over there!'  There is a working streetlight, and by it a group of children, clustered round another form which is lying by the side of the road.  They look up as Will's car screeches to a halt next to them, jumping back out of his way.  _Are we too late?_

Will leaps from the car and runs over to Giancarlo's prone body.  He kneels next to it and checks for a pulse.  _Still alive._  He looks up.  'Which one of you did this?'

'Me.  I did.  Bastard raped the girl.'  Jack points to Guilietta who is crouched by a wall, shaking. 'What you wanna do about it?'

Will takes the Knife from Giancarlo's outstretched hand.  'Do you know what this is?'

'A knife, innit?'  _Twat!  Is this stupid grownup gonna to try to fight me?_

Will has no fear of Jack or his followers.  Armed with this weapon, aged only thirteen, he faced down Iorek Byrnison, the armoured bear.  This is the Subtle Knife, the God-Killer, which he wielded in the Battle of the Plain, below the Clouded Mountain and the Fortress of Lord Asriel.  With one easy relaxed stroke he swings the Knife around his head, slicing straight through the lamppost next to them.  He pushes at it, and in a shower of sparks it tips over and falls across the road with a loud crash.

Will walks slowly over to the fallen lamppost and casually cuts it up into three-foot sections, the Knife scarcely hesitating as it passes though the steel and concrete.  He turns to the kids, taking up the characteristic crouch of the expert knife-fighter.

'Well?'

They turn and run.

'Let's be quick.  They'll be back soon, with their friends.'

Judy and Will carry Giancarlo to the Golf and Guilietta limps behind them.

'There's a first-aid kit on the back shelf.'  Will points to the rear of the car.  He j-turns it in a cloud of burning rubber and they fishtail back down the way towards the Ring Road, and safety.  Judy turns in her seat and grabs the box, spilling antiseptic cream and plasters.

'Are we going to the JR?'

'No, we're going back home.  You'll see why.'

Giancarlo, Judy, Will and Kirjava sit by the fireside in Will's flat, the humans drinking coffee and eating plain chocolate digestive biscuits.  Guilietta has been dosed up with paracetamol and put to bed in the spare room.  Her injury is not as serious as Giancarlo had feared.  Judy has cleaned and bandaged the cut in her leg, which is as clean as Giancarlo's wounds are ragged.  Fortunately, they are not deep.

'You've been very lucky,' Will tells Giancarlo.  'Of all the places you could have come out round here, that was the worst you could have chosen.'

'I didn't choose it!'

'If Remiel hadn't found us in time…'

'Would Somebody Please Tell Me What The Hell Is Going On?'

'Go on, Will,' says Kirjava.  'You tell her.  I'll fill in the bits you leave out.'

_A talking cat?  Is he a ventriloquist too?_  'How did you do that?'

Judy has been given Will's bed.  Will and Giancarlo are rolled up in duvets on the sitting room floor.  She should be asleep, but her churning thoughts will not let sleep come.

Angels.  Real angels.  An infinite number of other worlds, with people like us, but different.  Talking cats, that aren't cats at all but daemons.  Daemons, which aren't demons, nothing to do with Hell, but are part of us all, whether we can see them or not.

The End of Death.  The Death of God.  Love… and hatred.  And a gap between worlds that is infinitely narrow, but unbridgeably wide.  Unless you have and can wield… the Knife.

The Knife.  Not a simple material object, but a Purpose; living metal, infused with intention.  Infinitely sharp, beautiful and dangerous.

A name.  _Lyra_.  And a rending apart.

Will he ever be able to let her go?

_And where does that leave Will and me?_

It is fortunate that the next day is quiet at the John Radcliffe Hospital, as neither Will nor Judy are at their best.  Back at Will's flat, Giancarlo, Kirjava and Guilietta have a quiet day, too.  

When she woke, Guilietta ran around Will's flat, marvelling at all the everyday wonders with which it is filled.  The refrigerator, the light switches, the stereo, the microwave, the taps from which hot water comes steaming without anyone having to light a fire, the packets full of unfamiliar, but very attractive, food.

Most of all, she is entranced by the TV and sits on the floor three feet in front of it, clutching the remote and switching channels every few minutes.  She cannot contain her delight at the stream of glamorous brightly coloured images and sounds it presents to her.

'Carlo!  It's wonderful!  Why don't we have this at home?'  She does not fully understand that home is now further away than she has ever dreamed of travelling.

'Can we get a… TV when we get back?' she asks, eyes shining brightly.

Giancarlo is familiar with the workings of this twenty-first century England, and he is less overwhelmed by the endless parade of vivid impressions which have captured the imagination of his sister.  Six years since he was last here and surprisingly little has changed, he thinks.  He last lived in Will's world when he shared a flat in London with his father Giovanni.

_Papa._  There are things he must do in his father's world.  Their stay here can be only a short one.

In the afternoon they leave the flat and go into a nearby park.  Guilietta holds her brother's hand tightly.  'It is cold, Carlo.  And why does everybody go so fast all the time?'  The speeding cars frightened her as they crossed the road by the corner shop where they bought crisps and soft drinks – 'Oh!  This is what a Coke is like!' – to eat and drink as they lean on the playground railings next to the slides and swings.  Overhead, the vapour trails of passing aircraft draw unfamiliar linear clouds across the sky.  Guilietta sniffs.

'The air smells funny.  This is such a strange place.'

'It's not strange to the people who live here.'

Kirjava speaks:  'There are many stranger worlds than this.'  She tells them of the many places she and Pantalaimon saw while Will and Lyra sought their destiny in the Land of the Dead. Giancarlo and she swap reminiscences of their world-travelling days while Guilietta listens, open-mouthed.   If anybody passing by notices that the oddly-dressed boy and girl are talking to a cat, which may or may not be visible to them, they do and say nothing.  This is England, after all.

Will returns home at six o'clock, Judy with him.  Guilietta is glued to VH1 and pays them little attention.

'Have you chaps had anything to eat?  No, thought not.  Right, Judy and me are going down to Sainsbury's to stock up.  We'll be back in half an hour or so.

'We'll eat.  And then… we'll hold a council of war.'


	11. Oxford and Colombo

_Oxford_

'What on earth are we going to feed them all?'  The aisles of the supermarket stretch up and down before them, brightly lit and offering a vast array of choices.

'Giancarlo will eat anything.  Guilietta – I don't know.'

'How about pizza?  That must be safe.  All children love pizza.'

'OK, pizza it is.'

'What about Kirjava?  What does she eat?  Felix?  Whiskas?'

'Nothing. I mean; she doesn't actually _need_ to eat anything.  She's a metaphysical creature, mostly.

'But we'll get her some Pringles.  She likes to nibble…'

Judy stares at Will incredulously.  'You're winding me up!'

'Certainly not.'  Will tries hard to keep his face straight, but inside he is rolling on the floor, laughing.  'Sour cream and chives flavour.'

'I suppose you're going to tell me that Remiel eats and drinks too.  What shall we get him?  A pork pie?  Kippers?  A Dr Pepper?'

'Oh no, that would never do.  Angels don't like sodas.'

_Colombo, Sri Lanka, and Oxford_

Mary Malone sits on the bed in her room, facing the TV which is displaying the sitting room of Will's flat, transmitted to her by his phone.  It is half-past seven in the evening in Oxford; the small hours of the morning in Sri Lanka. 

'Hello Mary.  Are you alone?'  She has placed her own phone on top of the hotel TV.

'Will!  Yes, go ahead.  Who have you got with you?  Is that Giancarlo?  It can't be!'

'Mary!  It's been a very long time.'  _It certainly has.  Six years.  What a handsome young man he has become!_

'Who's that with you?'

'This is my sister, Guili.'  An extraordinarily beautiful child, eight or nine years old, with dark curly hair and deep brown eyes, waves shyly to Mary's face on the screen.  She had not known that you could talk to the TV as well as watch it.

'Hello, Guili.  Nice to meet you.'

'I'm Judy Beckley.  Hello, Mary.'  The girl sitting on the floor cushion next to Will is not what you would call conventionally pretty, but Mary sees in her the qualities that Will has already noticed.  _Could she be the one?_ Mary asks herself.

'Mary!'  Kirjava's greeting is addressed both to her and to her daemon, which is perched on her left shoulder.

Lastly a voice; near and distant, loud and soft, real and imaginary:  'Mary.  It is good to see you.'

Mary has never been comfortable talking to angels.  'Remiel.  Greetings.'  _I nearly said Welcome To Our Planet._

'OK, everyone.'  Will takes charge.  'We're all here because, in one way or another, circumstances have brought us together.  And because of this.'  He holds up the Knife.

'Does anyone here believe that we have all come together by chance?  Where _this_ is involved,' he lifts the Knife higher, 'there are no chances, or accidents.

'The Knife has an intrinsic Purpose, and it's hard for us to tell when we are doing what we want, or what it wants.  A friend of mine, a very wise creature indeed, once told me this:

__

_"Sometimes a tool may have other uses that you don't know.  Sometimes in doing what you intend you also do what the knife intends, without knowing."_

__

'We must keep in mind what Iorek Byrnison said all the time from now on.  We must examine and question our motives in everything we say and do.'

Will looks around at everyone in the room, and Mary too.  He puts the Knife down on the carpet.

'OK.  First; let's look at what the alethiometer told Lyra, bearing in mind that reading the instrument is still very hard for her.'

'Can we trust this… thing?'  Judy asks.  'Isn't it all a bit, well, magical?  Mystical?  Not real?'

Only Mary and Kirjava know how much control Will exerts on his anger at this point.  He is silent for a few seconds, grim-faced.  Then he turns to Judy.

'You see, Judy, it's all or nothing.  Either you believe us, or you don't.  Either everything I and Kirjava and Giancarlo have told you is true, or it's not.  There are no half measures – you're for us or you're against us.

'This is the time, right now, when you have to make your mind up.  You can get up and leave – I'll drive you home if you like – and we'll say no more about it.  We might even see another film together sometime.  Or you can stay, and learn the truth.  Be part of it.  Because only the truth is good enough for us.  The absolute truth.  Lyra knows that, and she would never lie, or misrepresent the alethiometer to us.

'That's it.  That's all I can say.  It's up to you now.'  Will looks down at the floor.  The room falls deathly quiet.

'I… I'm sorry, Will.  I'll keep quiet.'

'No!'  Will almost shouts the word.  'No!  What you say _matters_.  It's important.  Keep quiet, and you might as well not be here at all.'

Judy smiles wanly.  'Is he always like this, Mary?'

'Oh yes.  Sometimes much worse.  You'll get used to it.'

The atmosphere relaxes.  'Right.  The first thing the alethiometer said was this: _The Knife is on the move_.  That's obvious enough, I think.  Yes?'  Everybody nods their assent.  'The second thing was: _The girl's mother died_.  Before last night, I'd have said that meant Lyra's or Lizzie's mother, Mrs Coulter, although it was far from certain that that was what the alethiometer meant.  But now…'

'Guili,' says Giancarlo.  'Her mother was killed by a Spectre.'  Guilietta looks up.

'A Spectre that should not have existed.  Remiel?'

'That is correct.  While Giancarlo and Giovanni Bellini were using the Knife to travel from world to world, rescuing the trapped and dying Exiles, Spectres were let into the worlds from the Void beyond.  But I am absolutely sure that I destroyed each Spectre that appeared, including last night's.'

'What about the Spectres that were let in by me, and the Bearers before me?  The angel Xaphania told me and Lyra that they would be dealt with.  Are you sure that every single last one of them was destroyed also?  There were lots of them at the Battle of the Plain.'

'All the Spectres that were not killed by the Ghosts were extinguished by myself, or my brothers and sisters.'

_Will is cross-examining an angel!_  Judy can hardly believe what she is hearing.

'OK.  So we have a girl whose mother was killed by a Spectre that should not have existed.  A Spectre that was, apparently, not let into the worlds of living consciousness by the Subtle Knife.

'I think it's clear that Guili is the girl the alethiometer means.  She would not be here now if she were not.  Nor would the Knife.'  Guilietta's eyes are wide open and glistening with tears. Will turns to her and kisses her gently on the cheek.  'Guili, sweetheart, do you still want to stay here with us?'

The girl looks up to Will and Giancarlo.  'Yes, Doctor Will.  I'll stay.'  She wraps an arm around her brother's waist.

'You're a very brave girl.  OK, where does that leave us?  The alethiometer has told us something we thought we knew already.  The important thing is that it has made us _think_ about this thing that we know.'

Mary: 'We've got a Spectre that was not admitted by the Knife and wasn't left over after the War in Heaven.  That can mean only one thing…'

'Yes.  Somewhere there is another Knife.  Or something like it.'

'But there must be an infinite number of worlds of possibility in which the Knife was created.  This Spectre could have been created by one of those other Knives.  I don't see how that helps.'

'I know what you mean, Mary.   Looked at it that way, it's hopeless.  The numbers are just too big.  Haven't you noticed, though, that the worlds we have seen and travelled in have formed a sort of clump, or cluster?  I mean, we've seen many worlds which are very different from ours, and some which are quite similar.  We've never seen one that is almost exactly the same as ours, where there is only a tiny difference, like the pillar boxes being painted blue instead of red, for example.'

'I see what you mean.  The worlds are like the stars in the galaxies, they're a lot of them all grouped together, and then, a huge distance away across a wide gap, there could be another galaxy of worlds, like our own.'

'That's a good way of putting it.  In our local cluster of worlds, there is only one Cittagazze, only one world full of wheeled creatures, only one where people's daemons are separate entities.  Excepting present company, of course.'  Will smiles at Kirjava and strokes her lustrous fur.

'So… I think we can take it that if there is another Subtle Knife, it is in a world-cluster that is so far away that we and it will never come into contact with each other.'

'This other Knife, or whatever it is.  What should we be doing about it?'

'The Knife is so dangerous that, if it to be allowed to continue to exist,' did Giancarlo see the blade shiver? 'it must be kept under the strictest control.  It's just the same for any other Knife, or Knife-like device.'

'You think, then, that there is another Knife loose in the worlds?'

'I'm sure of it, Giancarlo.  Last Saturday, Judy and I saw the wound it made.'

Judy describes Jack Farrell's dramatic appearance in Casualty.  'I'd never seen anything like it until last night.  How sharp is that thing?'  She points to the Knife, where it lies on the floor in front of them, kept well in sight.

'Nobody knows.  There's no limit to what it can cut.

'OK.  I think we should leave the last thing the alethiometer told Lyra for a while and talk about the Knife a bit more.

'A day or two ago, I asked Mary to see if she could find out anything about any kind of device which could make a cut the way the Knife does, cleanly and without effort.' 

Will looks up to the screen of the TV.  'Mary, over to you.'

'There are two things.  First, I consulted the I Ching yesterday, and it told me that there was danger and that I could help.  Though what I can do when I'm stuck out here thousands of miles away, I don't know.'

'You're helping now.'

'Thanks, Will.  I can't help thinking, though, that the oracle may have had rather more in mind than just chatting on the phone.

'Anyway, did you look up those URLs I sent you?'

Will looks sheepish.   'Sorry, Mary, no.  I've been busy.'

'If you had _any_ idea what it cost me to get that information!'  _Roger the Dodger was sniffing around earlier.  Must have been chucked out of someone else's bed again._

'OK.  It's like this…'


	12. Colombo and Oxford

_Colombo, Sri Lanka, and Oxford_

'Did everybody follow that all right?'  Mary beams at her audience.

'Clear as mud!'

'What?'

'I'm sorry.  I didn't understand a word Mary said.  What are all those funny squiggles on the screen?'

Will: 'I think I'd better summarise.  Mary; shoot me down if I get it wrong.

'You probably know that all this,' waving his hand around the room, 'matter is made of atoms and molecules.  Tiny objects which are the building-blocks of the universe.  There are molecules for every kind of matter – oxygen molecules that we breathe, water molecules that we drink, and so on.  Sometimes a molecule contains only the same kinds of atoms, like oxygen.  Sometimes it's made up of two or more different kinds of atoms; like water which has got hydrogen _and_ oxygen atoms in it.

'OK so far?'

Everyone is happy, even Guilietta, who is half-asleep.

'The atom which is most important to us is carbon, because it's in  the molecules that our bodies are made of.  Carbon is a special atom in another way, because it can be put together in lots of different arrangements to make molecules.'

'Those are the _allotropes_ I was talking about.'

'That's right.  The amazing thing is that the different… allotropes of carbon have fantastically different properties.  The lead in this pencil is made of graphite, which is a slippery-slidey form of carbon.  It rubs off onto paper very easily.  The soot in a fireplace or a lamp chimney – that's carbon.  Then there's diamond, which isn't black or slippery and is nearly the hardest and sharpest substance there is – that's carbon too.

'That's not all.  Mary talked about something called a buckyball.'

'That's where I lost her completely!'

'Right, Judy.  It's a typical scientist joke.  A buckyball is a carbon molecule that's got sixty carbon atoms in it.  They form a hollow sphere with the atoms arranged in a lattice around the outside.'

'But why's it called a buckyball?  What sort of silly name is that?'

'It's named after a twentieth-century chap called Buckminster Fuller, who designed and built lots of hollow domes.  They had the same geodesic structure as the C60 molecule.'

'But Will, I don't understand.  What have these bucky-things got to do with the Knife?'

'Just one more step, Giancarlo.  The buckyball; it's like a net.  You could imagine pulling it from two sides and making a sort of string with it.'

'They tied us up with fishing nets!  In Siemione!'

'Spot on, Guili.  What you get if you fiddle about with a buckyball and pull it out straight is called a buckythread.  It's a very strong thread, very narrow, made up of a lattice of carbon atoms.

'Mary thinks, and so do I, that Jack Farrell's arm was cut off by a length of buckythread.'

'The thing is,' Mary says, 'that buckythread is very hard to make.  I mean, you could make a very short length, a few nanometres long, quite easily in the laboratory.  But the piece that cut off Jack Farrell's arm must have been much longer than that.  Perhaps as much as half a metre long.'

'So Mary asked around the scientists at the conference she's at to see if anyone is trying to make buckythread in significant amounts.'

'And I got an answer, and it's a very interesting one.  There's a firm called Geodesics Ltd who've been doing a lot of work with long-chain molecules for the past six or seven years.  The very interesting thing about them is that they're renting space in the old JET facility at Culham.'

'Culham?  That's near Abingdon!  Where Jack Farrell said he came from!'

'Right, Judy.'

'Wait a moment!  _Look for the Ring_…  JET… Mary, are you thinking what I'm thinking?'

'_The Ring_… Yes, Will – it has to be!  That has to be the place the alethiometer meant!'

_Oxford_

Guilietta has been put to bed and Mary has disconnected from the meeting to get some much-needed sleep.  Will, Kirjava, Judy and Giancarlo watch a little TV and drink coffee.  Remiel has gone wherever it is that angels go when they are not concerned with the affairs of men_.  Angels don't watch TV either_, thinks Judy.

After the news, Will and Giancarlo talk over old times.  Judy learns much more about the nature, up until now completely beyond her knowledge, of the worlds in which she lives and the great war that was fought, all unseen and unknown by her, between the forces of the Magisterium and the Republic of Heaven.

'And you're saying that the Authority died, and the usurping angel Metatron too?'

'We believe he died, although nobody saw it happen.'

'All the Powers and Principalities?  They passed on and left us free?'

'It was worse in Lyra's world. The Domination of the Church, I mean.  It was like – oh, as if the Spanish Inquisition had taken over in our world.  There were excommunications, and tortures and secret societies and Church Police and Church courts.  It was terrible, but, oh, it was so wonderful too.'  Will strokes Kirjava's supple back.

'There were things we saw and people we met that I can't forget.  I'll never forget them.  For as long as I live…'

'The talking bears you told me about.  And those tiny people, riding on their dragonflies.'

'They were as fierce and proud, and as great-hearted, as they were small.   The harpies, and the witches too.  Serafina Pekkala.  Lee Scoresby and his balloon…

'Oh Judy!  You've no idea how good it feels to have somebody to talk to about it all!'

'You mean, like the Pevensies and Aunt Polly and the Professor.   They met together to talk about Narnia after they returned to their own world.'

'To keep their memories alive in their hearts.   Reepicheep and Aslan, the _Dawn Treader_ and Cair Paravel.'

'Our beautiful castle by the sea, at the mouth of the Great River.  How could we ever forget?'

'The walls of Minas Tirith and the Pelennor Fields.  Legolas and Gimli…'

'The city of Nessus…'

'Severian the Torturer!  Yes!'

'Aramaath and Orodril…'

'…in the Last Redoubt!'

'How could we ever forget?'

They sit hushed for a while, gazing intently at each other.

Will suddenly says to Judy:  'He's a jackdaw!  Kir, can you see him?'

'You should know me better than that.  I've been able to see him for weeks.'

'Who?'

'Your daemon!  Just behind you, on the bookshelf.  No… he's on the TV.  Now he's on your knee.'

'Stop it!'

'No, really.  If Mary were here she'd be able to show you how to see him.  It's a trick – you have to look sideways, out of the corner of your eye.  It works best if you don't try too hard.

'Don't worry if you don't see him straight away.  It'll come.'

'I believe you.  Thousands wouldn't.  But look; there was something I was going to ask you.'

'Ask away.'

'You said there was a war in Heaven, and the good people won and the bad people lost.'

'Yes.'

'And the victory was won for us all – for everyone in all the worlds, you, me, Giancarlo and Guilietta, Lizzie and Lyra.

'But there's still so much evil loose everywhere.  The Oil Wars here, the troubles in Giancarlo's world.  Why hasn't everything got better in the last, what is it, twelve years?'

Will thinks for a while.  Then:

'It's like this.  Imagine that you're a prisoner, chained up in a deep dark underground dungeon.'

'Like Christian the Pilgrim in the castle of Giant Despair?'

'Or Toad, in _The Wind in the Willows_.  Right.  Now, one day, there's a revolution, or something like that, and all the doors of all the dungeons are thrown wide open and all the padlocks are struck off your chains.'

'You're free, then.'

Will shakes his head.  'You're still in a dungeon.  You've got to get up onto your feet, and pass through the doors, and climb the stairs out of the keep, and enter the castle courtyard, and walk under the gatehouse, and cross over the drawbridge, and go out into the open air before you can really say you're free.

'We're like that.  The chains have gone and the doors are open.  All we've got to do is stand up and walk out of gaol…'

Giancarlo leaves the room and lets himself out through the back door of Will's flat.  He walks down to the canal side and sits there by himself for a while, listening to the sounds of the city; the ever-present traffic, a TV here and a stereo there.  The glow of the streetlights is reflected by the water of the canal; there are lit windows in the houses up and down the bank.  People are calling out to each other in the street; they are going out to the pubs, clubs and restaurants of Oxford, visiting each other's houses, never, as it seems to him, stopping to rest.  _This was my world, once._  If he were sitting now on the pantiled roof outside his bedroom window in his father's house in Cittagazze, he would see nothing but what the living moon and stars chose to show him, and hear nothing but the sighing of the night-wind in the cypress trees.

This place is noisy and busy, dirty and dangerous.  Home is warm, so beautiful and yet – there is a canker at the heart of his world.  _The Knife._  While there is still the possibility of using it to steal objects and knowledge from other worlds, his people will never recover the will to rebuild their own world using their own resources.  The Knife has robbed his people of the vitality which is everywhere here.  _We used to be a great people.  We were philosophers, builders, inventors.  Now all we can invent are perverted religions, like the Church of St Tullio_.  The philosophers of the Torre degli Angeli committed an act of terrible hubris when they created the Knife, but they made great works of scholarship and imagination as well.

_When I return to Ci'gazze, I will have a new Task.  Before, I only had to save a few hundred Exiles.  Now, I have a whole world to redeem._

When Giancarlo returns to the flat, the sitting room is deserted and there is a faint light showing under the door of Will's bedroom and low voices within.  He smiles to himself, rolls up in his duvet and goes to sleep.

_Tomorrow.  My Task begins tomorrow._


	13. Oxford

_Oxford_

Miriam grins broadly at her flatmate.  'Stop the night, did we?'

'It's not like you think it is.'

'Oh no?  I suppose you're going to tell me you sat up and talked all night.'

'Yes!  Yes, we did!'

'So what did you talk about?'

'Stories, if you must know.'

'Oh yes.  Very likely, I'm sure.'

'Suspicious cow!'  _If you only knew!_

_Oxford_

'Pan, I'm worried.'

'About Will?'

'Yes.'

'You should be more worried about yourself.  If you fall asleep in one more tutorial, you'll be up in front of the Dean.'

'I can't help it.  You know.'

'Of course I know.  I'm yours.'

'I'm yours too.  Come here.'  Pantalaimon leaps across the desk onto Lyra's lap in a lithe motion of red-gold fur.  Together they look out of the window, over the quadrangle.  Above the roofs opposite, over which Lyra and Pantalaimon would roam – when she was a child, when he was able to change his form whenever he wished; and they were both free, free to love and hate and give no thought to anyone but themselves – wave the great chestnut trees in the evening breeze.

'I'm going to do another reading.'

'No!  You'll wear yourself out.'

'I've got to know what's happening.'

'What good will it do?  You can't help him now.'

'I can send him another message.'

'Do you still trust Lizzie?'

'I… don't know.  I'm not sure I do any more.  There's something about her…'

'I'm not sure either…'

_Oxford_

By ransoming his immortal soul Will manages to get the afternoon and evening free not just from duty, but also from being on call.  _I'm going to have to work a few graveyard shifts when this is all over_, he thinks.  Judy is free too, having persuaded Miriam to fill in for her, and put up with any number of winks and suggestive remarks in the process.

'Fish and chips!'  Will stands in front of the TV, blocking the screen and provoking a furious sulk from Guilietta.  'In the kitchen.'   They share out the hot and greasy packages around the Formica table.  Judy introduces Guilietta to the delights of malt vinegar and tomato ketchup and they dig in, not bothering with such formalities as knives, forks and table manners.  Giancarlo and his sister would be happier there weren't so much oily batter, but the fish inside is good enough.

'All the food here tastes funny, Carlo,' Guilietta says.  Giancarlo looks embarrassed, but Will smiles.  'Don't worry.  I'm not offended.'  To Guilietta: 'You see, Guili, we're a long way from the sea, here in Oxford.  The fish has to come a long way before we can eat it.  It's not like being in Ci'gazze where you can take the fish straight off the boat and cook it.'

'Don't bother Doctor Will any more, sweetheart.'

Judy hands Guilietta a tub of chocolate ice cream and she retreats to the sitting room, remote in hand.  Will makes coffee for the grownups.

'OK, chaps.

'Giancarlo and me are going to Culham tonight.  We're going to break in and see if we can find out what's going on.  Oh, just a mo.  Had a thought.'

Will takes out his phone.  'Mary.'  She answers, audio only, thirty seconds later.  'Will, hello.'

'Mary, hi.  There's me, Judy and Carlo here.  Are you busy?'

'Rather.'

'I'll be quick, then.  Carlo and me are going to have a look around Culham tonight.  Fancy joining us?'

'Join you?  How… Oh, I see.  Yes, I'd love to.  Wouldn't want to miss any of this.'

'Great.  The I Ching said you could help us.  This has to be what it meant.  I think you'll make quite a difference.'

'Call me later?'

'Yes.  Go and get some beauty sleep.'

_Click_.

'Just you and Carlo?'

'Sorry Judy.  Someone's got to look after Guili.'

'And it's got to be me, has it?  "Staff, look after the child, would you"?'

Will winces.  'No really, Judy.  It's got to be Carlo and me who go.  We're the Knife-bearers.'

'What if you get into trouble?'

'We'll deal with that.'

'Suppose you're hurt.  Who's going to drive you back?'

'Hmmm…'

'Not Carlo!'

'OK, you've got a point.  But who'll take care of Guili?'

'My flatmate Miriam will… No.  Shit.  She's on duty, filling in for me.'

'Damn.'  Will thinks.

'You're right about driving.  I hadn't thought of that.  All right, you and Guili can come.  But you're both staying in the car.  Yes?'

'Yes, doctor.'

Will speaks to Giancarlo.  'There's something that's bothering me, about the Knife.'

'What's that?'

'When you left Cittagazze, you and Guili walked north, didn't you?  Over the hills?'

'Yes.'

'About how far?'

'It's hard to say.  We didn't know where we were going, the first day.  It might have been… ten miles, maybe.'

'And you went north.'

'Yes.'

'That's what's worrying me.  When I last used the Knife in your world, I cut a window from somewhere near the centre of Cittagazze and came out in north Oxford, just off the Banbury road.  If you went ten miles north from Cittagazze to Siemione then your window should have come out halfway to Banbury, in the middle of the countryside.

'Instead, you came out in _south_ Oxford, in Blackbird Leys… We've got two possibilities to check out.  Either the two worlds, yours and mine, have shifted with respect to each other by around five or six miles, so that the old points of reference don't line up any more, or they've turned round, so that north in your world is south in mine.  We need to make some experiments before we set out tonight.

'Judy, fancy a trip to the countryside?  Guili!' shouting through the kitchen door over the roar of the TV.  'We're going for a ride in the car!'

_Oxford_

_The child_.  And _death_.  Lyra looks at her notes.  There is no doubt about the outcome of the reading, but when was the alethiometer last so terse or so oblique?

Who is the child?  Is the child going to die?  Or is the instrument referring to _death_ as something abstract?  Lyra met her own death once.  Is that what it means?  Is Will going to die?

_If he died, I'd know.  I'd follow him.  I wouldn't hesitate for a moment._

She turns to Pantalaimon, whose face reflects her own concern.  Somehow the child – whoever he or she may be – and death are closely linked.  Will is in there somewhere, for he was in the question that she put to the alethiometer:  _What is going to happen to Will?_

For what seems like the hundred thousandth time, she thinks _if only_.  If only she could contact Will directly – not just for the joy it would give her and, she hopes, him – she would be able to offer him her help.

'It doesn't have to mean that Will is going to die.'

'I know, Pan.'  Lyra puts her face in her hands.  'But it's all too closely connected.  Will, the child, death, the Ring.'

'And the Knife.'

'Especially that.  Oh Pan – why?  Why did they have to make it?'

'We'd never have met Will or Kirjava if they hadn't.'

Lyra stands up, pushes back her chair and paces around the room, distraught with fear and anger.

'I know. I know.  I know!  Oh stars above, I wish I didn't!'

Pantalaimon sits on Lyra's shoulder and wraps himself around her neck, gently nuzzling her ear.

'We can't tell Lizzie.'

'No?'

'No Lyra, we mustn't.'

'So we can't tell Will, either.'

Lyra leans against her windowsill.  Outside it is dark.  On the other sides of the quad a few windows show lighted candles or the soft flare of naphtha.

_Will is going into terrible danger.  And there is nothing Pan or I can do about it._


	14. Oxford and Culham

_Oxford_

It is seven o'clock and nearly time to change for dinner.  Lady Elizabeth Boreal sits in her boudoir which is, like all the rooms in her house, beautifully and expensively furnished.  Parander, her serpent-daemon, lies on the eighteenth-century writing desk in front of her, coiled around the silver inkwell.

It has been a busy day, as, indeed, they always are.  The Boreal estates are extensive and their industrial concerns, while not rivalling those of Jordan College in size, are very profitable.  As non-executive Chairman of the board of the Boreal Foundation, Lizzie's responsibilities are what she cares to make them.

Her mother Marisa Coulter was never one to sit back and let events take their course.  Neither is Lizzie.

Something is worrying her, however.  She cannot ignore the nagging feeling that she has made a serious mistake.

'You had to say something, or Will would have been suspicious.'

'Yes, I know.  But…'

_Did I let my feelings for Will cloud my judgement?_

'I don't see how you could have changed Lyra's message.'

'We shouldn't have told them the third part – _Look for the Ring_.'

'Kirjava would have known if I'd held anything back.  She's not stupid.'

'We could have changed it to something less… revealing.'

'Kirjava might still have noticed.  And besides…'

'It's pretty obscure.  I know.  But it's just the sort of thing he might try to follow up.'

'Shall we warn them?'

'Hmmm… yes.  It can't hurt.'  Lizzie takes a sheet of paper, writes a short message in her elegant hand, and seals it with her father's ring.  She sends for a footman who enters, takes the note, bows deeply, and leaves the room.

_There.  That's all I can do for now._

Lizzie rings for her maid.  Will she wear the yellow or the blue silk frock tonight?

_Culham and Colombo, Sri Lanka_

It is ten o'clock and fully dark as Will pulls into the far corner of the car park of the Waggon and Horses public house in the village of Culham.

'This'll do.  Keep the inside car lights off.'

'What'll we do when the pub turns out?'

'That won't be for an hour or so.  You and Guili just keep your heads down.  Anyone who does notice the car will assume the owner's had too much to drink and taken a taxi home.'

'OK.  Will… do take care.'

'We will.  Now, let's get going.'  Will flips his phone open.  'Mary.'

'Here.'

'Nice of you to join us.  Right, now you, Judy.'  Judy dials in, audio only, to Will and Mary's call.  Will clips his phone to his top pocket and fixes a headset to his right ear.

'Are we all online?'

'Yes.'

'Check.'

'Can't see much.'

'That's because it's dark.'  Will keys up the video gain on his phone.  'Better?'

'Picture's noisy as hell, but OK.'

Dressed in the darkest clothes that Will could find in his wardrobe, he, Kirjava and Giancarlo get out of the car.  Will is wearing a sidepack which contains a compass and an electric torch.  Giancarlo carries nothing but the Subtle Knife.  Mary tries not to let the jerky picture she receives on her TV as Will walks along the pavement make her feel too queasy.  Outside her hotel window the sun is coming up over the roofs of Colombo.

Keeping to the shadows, Will, Kirjava by his side, and Giancarlo walk half a mile or so to a piece of open ground where they can see the fence that surrounds the group of buildings they plan to investigate.  The moon shines from behind them, outlining its structure.

'What an ugly place!'

'It's practical, Carlo.  That's the way we build here.  You remember.'

'It didn't have to look so awful.  Didn't you tell me this was a place of learning and philosophy?'

'Well, yes.'

'In Ci'gazze, it would have been our joy to make such a place as beautiful as we could.'

'Will, Carlo, I hate to interrupt, but shouldn't you be getting on with it?'

'Sorry, Mary.'  To Giancarlo:  'It looks like about 40 meters,' checking his compass, '…due west.  Beam us over, Scotty!'

'Perdono?'

'Cut a window!'

Recalling the feel, the location, the _vector_, of the world that Will and he found that afternoon, Giancarlo takes out the Knife and makes a cut, slicing into space-time, left and right, up and down, opening a window for Will and himself.  They step through it into an empty desert world; wide sands and green sky, pink sun and purple clouds.  'Remiel?'

'It is done.'  Remiel has nullified the Spectre which Giancarlo's Knife-cut let in to a world not far from theirs.  'Keep an eye out for us, will you?'

'Ever your guardian angel, Will, Carlo.'

Will and Giancarlo take forty strides westward.  This is the world they found that afternoon when they drove out into the Oxfordshire countryside to test out the Knife.  Giancarlo's own world is not safe for them, and others are occupied, or misaligned, or the window he cuts opens out onto open sea, or a sheer drop, or deep underground.

Will has used this method of breaking into a building before, twelve years previously, at Sir Charles Latrom's house in north Oxford.  It is new to Giancarlo.

'OK, now let's go back to my world and see where we come out.'

Mary and Judy lost Will's signal when he and Giancarlo crossed over into the transit world.  Now that they have returned, and are standing within the fence by the outside wall of the main complex, Will must dial back into their call.

'Damn!  I knew this was going to be a pain!'  It is too much to expect that Vodafone will have set up phone cells in all the worlds of probability.

'Judy, Mary, we're past the fence.  Next time, Carlo, we'll go inside the building.  I'm not expecting that we'll find any actual people in there – it's too late at night – but there will probably be monitoring devices.'

'Burglar alarms?'

'That sort of thing.  They'll be set up to detect the heat of our bodies.  There'll be motion sensors, and TV cameras too.  We must be very careful when we move around inside the building.'

'We can use the Knife to go from place to place inside as well.'

'Yes, that's what I intend to do.  Right – no more messing about.  In we go!'

The man and woman sit on swivel chairs in front of a bank of monitors, whose screens show an assortment of views of the area, relayed by the infrared cameras that ring the JET complex.

'Why are there two of them?'

'I expected Parry - the LR message mentioned him.  He's the shorter one.  The other one – I've no idea where he came from.'

'Is it a man?'

'Don't know.  I think so.'

They watch the screens closely.  Then:

'What the fuck?'

'They just… vanished!'

'That's impossible!  Try the other cameras.'

'There!  By the wall!  They're back!  How the hell did they do that?  They just skipped across forty yards of empty space!' 

'Zoom in.  Yes, that's him.  It's definitely Parry.'

'And the other one – wait!  What's that?'

The man sits back in his chair, then leans forward again, his eyes intent on the screen.  'Yes!'  He adjusts the camera's pan and zoom controls.  'Do you see that?  In his hand?'

'Something shiny?  Are they tooled up?  Is that a knife he's holding?'

'Absofuckinglutelyright it is.'  Mr Greaves swivels his chair around to face Miss Morley.  'If I'm right – and I know I am – we are the luckiest pair of bastards in the whole wide world.

'We've got to play this right.  Absolutely right.  'Cause if we do, it's payday.  Now, and for the rest of our lives.

'Payday…'


	15. Culham

_Culham and Colombo, Sri Lanka_

'Ooof!'  Judy's head falls forward and hits the headrest of the seat in front of her.

'Are you all right, Judy?' Guilietta asks.

'Yes, love; sorry.  Just a bit startled.  I must have dropped off.'

'You're very sleepy today.'

'I was up all last night.  Most of the night before, too'

'Talking to Doctor Will?'

'Yes.'  Turning to the child sitting next to her on the back seat: 'You don't miss much, do you?'

'What do you mean?'

'Nothing.  What are Doctor Will and Carlo doing now?'

'Listen and you'll see.'

'Now then.  Judy, Mary; are you still there?'

'Yes.'

'Yes.'

'Right.  Watch this, ' Will grins broadly. 'We're going to deploy our secret weapon.'

'Go on.  You're longing for me to ask.  What _is_ our secret weapon?'

'Kirjava.  I don't suppose for a moment the burglar alarms here were set up to detect anyone quite as aethereal as her.'

'Oh…'

'Yes!'

'Does she know what she's looking for?'

'Who's "she"?  I have a name, you know.  And yes, I do.'

'We'll start off by finding out where the Geodesics Ltd offices are.  There'll be a sign on the door, or something like that.'

'Please, Judy.  Do not make things worse by asking me if I can read!'

'I wouldn't dream of it.  Will; you and Kirjava really are a pair, aren't you?'

Mary:  'You're learning!'

'Carlo, let's make another cut.  This time, we'll aim to go about three meters south, so we're inside the building.'

Giancarlo slices space open with the Knife and he and Will pass through the window into the world of the pink sun.  Half a minute later, they reappear in the main staircase lobby.  Again, Will hits his phone's redial button.

'Online, everyone?'

'Mary here.'

'Carlo.  Can I talk to Carlo?'

'Sorry, Guili.  We're busy.  Later.

'Kir, listen.  There will be doors that you won't be able to open.  They'll be locked, or on cardkey access.  If you get stuck, tell me.  We'll find you and use the Knife to get through them.

'Take care!'

Tail erect, Kirjava stalks the silent corridors of the complex, stealthy and unseen.

'What are they doing now?'

'Nothing, it looks like.  Just standing there'

'Keep an eye on all the screens.  They could make another jump any time.'

'OK.  There they… Shit!  They disappeared again!'

'Look, look, look…  There!  In the main lobby.  Now what are they doing?'

The monitor shows Will and Giancarlo sitting at the bottom of the staircase.

'This doesn't make any sense.  We know they've got that knife you told me about.  That's how they're skipping through walls and thin air. But why the hell are they just sitting around doing nothing?'

'I don't know.  Right now, I don't care.  I don't think it matters.'

'You told me that we were only supposed to observe Parry, not go after him.  The message said.'

A flash of anger crosses Mr Greaves' face.  'Never mind what the fucking message said. What matters is getting hold of that knife.  If we get it, out job's done and we can shut down Geodesics tomorrow.'

'I wouldn't mind.  This place is a dump.  Just the knife?'

'No.  We need the guy who's carrying it too.  It'll only work for him.'

'You mean, he'll only make the openings for us if we're nice to him?'

'Or if we've got an angle.'

'So we make it unpleasant for him if he doesn't help us?'

'Or pleasant.  Doesn't matter, as long as the bastard does his bit.'

'What's the plan, then?'  Miss Morley is well known throughout the Latrom Foundation for her efficiency in organisation and management.  The actual work, however, she prefers to leave for others to do.

'That knife's a killer.  We can't go for him while he's holding it.  It's got to be something else.'

'Would he… cooperate if he was made an offer?'

'That he couldn't refuse?  No, I don't think so.  Like I said, we need an angle.'

'Suppose we split them up?  Get the one without the knife.  Use him as a hostage.'

'Parry?  I suppose it might work.  Would the other one care if we damaged Parry a bit?'

'Dunno.  Can't tell.'

'We'd better think of something soon, or they'll disappear again and we'll lose them altogether.'

'Ooof!'

Judy looks up, blinking.  _Hell!  Fell asleep again!_

'Sorry, Guili.'

'Guili?'

_Oh my God!_  The open car door swings slowly to and fro in the soft night air.

Down the side of the road towards the JET complex runs Guilietta Bellini, her lightly shod feet pattering along the footpath.  _Why wouldn't Doctor Will let me talk to Carlo?  Is there something the matter and they're not telling me?_  She passes by the perimeter fence, seeing nobody, and reaches the side gate, which is shut and padlocked.

Neither gates nor padlocks can stop a determined eight year old.  Guilietta swarms up the bars of the gate, deftly avoids cutting herself on the barbed wire that is coiled in wide loops over the top of it and lightly drops down to the pathway on the other side.  She runs towards a side entrance door and bangs hard on the glass.

'Carlo!  Carlo!'

Judy speaks urgently into her phone.  'Will, Mary!  Help!  Oh God, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.'  She is close to tears.

'Slow down.'  Mary looks closely at her TV screen which has been showing her a static picture of the lobby and main stairway of the complex for the last ten minutes while Kirjava has been exploring the building.  'What's wrong?'

'Go on, Judy.  Take it slowly.  What's happened?'

Giancarlo sees Will speaking urgently into his headset.  _What's wrong with Judy?  What's happened?  No, it can't be…_

'I'm sorry.  I was tired… and I must have dozed off.  Guili's gone.  I've no idea where.'

'Look! There's another one of them!'  Miss Morley points to a screen at the far right of the bank of monitors.  Guilietta's diminutive figure can be seen jumping up and down, her fists knocking against the door.

'Now what do we have here?  That's a damn sight more like it!'  Mr Greaves leaps to his feet, his swivel chair skidding to the back of the room and colliding with a bank of filing cabinets with a loud metallic crash.  He runs out of the room and down the stairs outside.

Miss Morley smiles grimly.  This child is a gift to them. It matters little whether she is connected with the intruders or not.  It is difficult to imagine how anybody will be able to refuse to do as they are told once Greaves and she have the girl in their power.  Or be able to endure for long unmoved her pleas for mercy.

Her heart thumping and her mind numbed by of an overwhelming feeling of dread Judy grabs her phone and, barely stopping to shut the Golf's doors behind her, sprints out of the pub car park towards the JET complex.


	16. Culham

_Culham and Colombo, Sri Lanka_

Miss Morley has left the bank of screens and walked to the door at the head of the stairs that Mr Greaves ran down a few minutes previously.  This means that she does not see Judy arrive at the side gate.  Nor do she or Greaves hear Judy's involuntary cry of despair as she sees, from the corner of the perimeter fence where she has stopped to regain her breath, a thick-set man emerge from a door and roughly seize Guilietta, dragging her into the building.

Judy shakes the fence making it rattle metallically, but doing no good.  _It can't have been Will.  Even if he was angry with her for running off, he wouldn't treat Guili like that._

'Will, Mary!  Someone's taken Guili inside!  It wasn't you, was it?'

'No Judy.  Wait there.  We'll try to work out what to do.'

Guilietta is taken by the man and dragged upstairs to the Security room, kicking, biting and screaming out loud 'Carlo, Carlo!'  He is strong and brutal, and ignores the girl's struggles until her incessant shouting finally gets on his nerves.  He is not good with children.

Mr Greaves slaps Guilietta hard on the side of her face, reddening her cheek and making her head ring.  'Shut it, you stupid little bitch!  Or you'll get another one.'

Still fighting and wriggling in Mr Greaves' grip, Guilietta looks up, her face contorted with pain.  'What have you done to Carlo?'

Miss Morley smiles down to her.  'Nothing yet.'

_It's all going terribly, horribly wrong.  And it's my fault._

Kir!  Get back here now!  There's someone else here and they've got Guili! 

Coming.

Will forces himself to be calm and think hard.  There is little that the angel Remiel can do to help them.  There are just Giancarlo and him, plus Kirjava.  His daemon can team up with Giancarlo and they can search the building for Guilietta in two teams, Kirjava providing the link they need.  They can use the Knife to move through the complex and escape if they need to.  But only if they stay on the ground floor.  The green-skied world's ground is at the same level as here – that is why they chose it.  And, of course, only the Knife-bearer can cut a window.  If Will is caught by himself, he will be in serious trouble.  _How many of them are there?_  Judy saw one man, but they might be many more.  Who is it?  The caretaker?  If so, they might be able to talk their way out of this situation.  At the very least there would be an embarrassing interview with the police, but he could say he was called out to a patient and made a mistake with the address.  Being a doctor does have its benefits.

'That won't wash, not in a secure building!'  Kirjava is back.

'Carlo, we're going to have to search this place.  You take Kirjava with you, and take the ground floor.  Use the Knife if you have to.  I'll go upstairs.  Kirjava will tell me if you find anything.  Then…'

Will's voice is interrupted by a loud click from the Tannoy speaker mounted on the wall above them.  A woman's voice, harshly distorted by the public address system, speaks to them.

'Doctor Parry.  I know you can hear me.  We would like to talk to you.'

Will and Giancarlo listen, horrified.  They can hear, muffled in the background, Guilietta's crying:  'Carlo!  Doctor Will!'

'As you can probably hear, we have somebody else with us already.  I am sure she would like to see you.

'Please follow my instructions exactly…'

Mary realises that she is thumping her clenched fists on the top of the TV.  She sits back on the bed of her hotel room and makes an effort to relax and speak steadily into her phone.  'Will, Judy, don't forget I'm here too.'

_For all the good that will do._

Over the Tannoy, Miss Morley directs Will and Giancarlo down the long, gloss-painted and linoleum-floored corridors of the JET building, following their progress on the monitors.  They pass through locked doors, whose catches spring open as they approach.  The ceiling lights turn on ahead of them and off again behind, when they are no longer needed.  Will's heart is sinking fast.  Giancarlo and he are completely out of their depth.  How could he have been so stupid as to think that they could simply walk into a secure high-tech facility and roam freely around inside it, completely undetected?

_It was the Knife.  It betrayed us.  It made us overconfident.  We thought we could do anything we liked so long as we had it._

Another thought is nagging at Will.  _How did they know we'd be here?  We told nobody else.  Nobody else at all._

Judy sits on the ground by the fence outside the complex.  Like Mary, she has heard everything that has happened on her phone.  Like her, she feels angry and fearful; frustrated that she can do nothing to help.

_But I'm here, not thousands of miles away in Sri Lanka.  I must be able to do something._

She stands up and looks around.  The public road stretches moonlit up and down past the entrance.  She could flag down a passing car and ask for help.  She could call the police.

_That's an idea!  We'd be in trouble, but it couldn't be any worse than what we're in already._  No, she realises sickeningly, she can't do that.  Carlo and Guili do not belong in this world.  They have no ID, no NHS number; they exist on no public databases.  The police would ask too many questions to which there could be no answers.

She walks back along the fence, risking, although she does not appreciate it, detection by the security cameras.  Turning the right angle at the corner, she approaches, as far as the fence will let her, the door through which Guilietta was taken.

It is slightly open.  Guilietta must have kicked at it as she was pulled through and prevented it from closing properly.

'Will!  I can see a way in!'

'No, Judy.  Stay outside.  This is bad enough already, without any more of us getting involved.'

_Look after this one for me, Staff.  How is the patient today, Staff?_  Suddenly, Judy has had enough of being ordered around by doctors.  She looks up at the fence.  If a little girl like Guili can climb it, so can she.  

Judy takes hold of the fence by a support post and raises her right leg, sticking her toe into the mesh, grateful that she is wearing sensible shoes.  _Damn this skirt!  I knew I should have worn trousers!_

This is no time for modesty.  Judy hitches her skirt up around her waist and climbs the fence, taking great care with the barbed wire at the top, but laddering a perfectly good pair of tights just the same.

'Well done, Doctor Parry.  Now I want you and your companion – Carlo, is it? – to go through the first door to the left.  That's it – the one with the Geodesics sign on the glass.  You will find a large room with a table to your right and a couple of chairs next to it.  Do make yourselves comfortable.  We will be with you in a few minutes.'

Will, Kirjava and Giancarlo do as they are told.  The room is certainly large; about twenty metres long by fifteen metres wide and brilliantly illuminated by fluorescent tubes hanging from the five metre high ceiling.  There is another door set in the opposite wall and around the laboratory's walls are an assortment of bookshelves and benches; some stacked with electronic equipment, some loaded down with chemical glassware – retorts, test tubes and beakers – and, against the wall on the left, a row of expensive-looking SGI 4D workstations in gaudy purple and cream.

However, this flashy high-end computing hardware is not the most interesting thing in what is clearly a very well-endowed laboratory.  In the centre of the floor is a test stand; made up of two metal benches about a metre apart, each with a vertical pole fixed to the end.  The two poles appear to form the two uprights of a letter H, an impression confirmed by the crosspiece which runs between them, a little more than a metre from the floor.  Wires run from both sides of the H to a rack of equipment which rests on the right-hand bench.

'Give me a close-up of that rack, would you?  The one on the right.'

Mary examines carefully the shaky picture of the electronics rack that Will's phone sends her.  A 150KV power supply, a distribution panel, what looks like a shelf of old-fashioned HP blade servers, and…

_My word.  We have got a lot of money to throw around, haven't we?_  A Bruel and Kjaer isochronic transphase generator!  B&K sell only two or three ITGs a year, built to order, and they require a certified third party, such as one of the larger Swiss banks, to guarantee the transaction, so enormous are the sums involved.  Mary has only ever seen one ITG before in her life, and that was attached to the supercollider at CERN…

CERN!  An ITG.  And buckythread.  There is an almost audible click in Mary's head as she makes the mental connections.

'Will!  I think I know what they're trying to do here…'

Mr Greaves has had to slap Guilietta on the other cheek, and it still hasn't stopped the hideous brat yelling her head off.

'Leave off, won't you?  You'll only make her worse.'

'Can't help it.  She's getting on my tits.'

Guilietta is tiring and fighting less hard now.  She allows herself to be dragged along the corridor, feet trailing behind her, by Mr Greaves.  After passing through a series of hallways and bumping painfully down an open staircase, Miss Morley unlocks a heavy metal door and they enter the laboratory on the opposite side from where Will, Kirjava and Giancarlo are waiting for them.  Carlo sees Guilietta's tear-streaked face and pink cheeks and rises to his feet with a cry of rage.

'Sit down.  Or I'll ask my friend here to see to the child.  Properly.'

Will tugs at Giancarlo's sleeve.  'It's going to be OK, _mio amico_.  Let's just listen to what they have to say.'  The young man reluctantly sits down.

Will has recognised the man and woman from their appearances at the John Radcliffe Hospital's A&E department.  Now, Mary supplies the mental jolt he needs to remember their names.

'Will!  The woman!  I know her.  She very nearly crippled me, ten years ago when I was at The Grove, with your mother.'  _She's well out of this. _ 'She used to be known as Miss Morley.'  __

The Grove!  Then the man must be Greaves, the faithful servant of Henry Latrom, who died before he could be returned to his own world.  Lyra's world.  _Lizzie's world_.

It's all starting to knit together and make sense.  Time to take back the initiative.  Will calmly drops his bombshell.

'So; Mr Greaves, Miss Morley.  How long have you been trying to cut a window through to the world of the Boreals?'

Mr Greaves gasps audibly, but Miss Morley is made of something altogether more icy, and she keeps her cool.

'We made our first breakthrough in summer 2004.  That's nearly six years ago.'

'Thank you, Miss Morley.  I can count the years perfectly well for myself.  Let me guess, you've hit problems since in your attempts to open and maintain a window.  Have you had trouble making enough buckythread?'

'There have been some issues, yes.  We have overcome them.'

'As Jack Farrell discovered.'

'Farrell is a bloody fool who ought to look where he's going.'

'Very bright, but no common sense?  I've met dozens like him.  Is he in The Grove now?  Or somewhere a little less expensive?'

'Geodesics looks after its employees, Doctor Parry.'

'I'm very glad to hear it.  That rig's interesting.  What are you using to insulate the buckythread from the supports?  Teflon?'

'Ceramic stand-offs.  They resist the heat better.'

Mr Greaves has had enough.  What does this stupid woman think she is doing, wasting time having a technical discussion with Parry?  He spots something which he has not noticed before.  He has been too focussed on the Knife, and he has not seen Parry face-to-face this evening, only via TV monitors.

'Stop!  Can't he see?  He's got a phone!  In his top pocket!'

'Oh yes.  So he has.  How very clever of you, Doctor Parry.  You're running video over that, I suppose?'

_Damn!  Keep cool!_  'High resolution, thirty-two bit colour.  International call, too.  I'm not going to enjoy my next phone bill.  Not at all.'

'Oh dear me.  I must ask you to finish your call, remove the phone from your pocket – very slowly – and put it on the table.  Ah, and that headset as well, if you don't mind.  Thank you.

'Also, I understand that you have a daemon, in what we both understand to be the full sense of the word.  I must warn you that that if she – I presume it is a _she_ – tries to interfere with our, how shall I put it, _negotiations_, we shall have to take various unpleasant and messy measures which we would rather avoid.

'Involving the girl.  You have already seen what the Thread can do.  Do I need to spell it out to you?  Would you like to see a demonstration now, on one of her fingers or toes, maybe?'

Guilietta is still held securely in Mr Greaves' grip.  She does not understand what is being said about her, or why she cannot join her brother and Doctor Will.

Will puts his hand on Giancarlo's shoulder.  He can feel it shaking, with anger, fear, or both, under his palm.  'Be patient, Carlo.  We must see what we can do.'

To Miss Morley:  'You wouldn't have taken Guilietta hostage or be trying to use her to bargain with us if we didn't have something you want.  Why don't you tell us what it is?'

'The Knife, you tosser!' the short-fused Mr Greaves bellows.  'We want the fucking Knife!'

'Quite so, Doctor Parry.  We want, as my colleague so eloquently puts it, the fucking Knife.  And we want the fucking Knife-bearer too.  And if we get both of them, we may not harm the girl.'

'You'll give her back to us?'

'Oh no, that would not be a good idea.  And please don't get some silly idea about rescuing her, or something else equally melodramatic and futile.  We'll hang on to her, as an earnest of your good faith.

'You see, we want our window back.  We want our business back.  And when it comes to business, I never let anything stand in my way.'

'You know she'll die if you keep her here, don't you?  She'll die in two years or less, if she doesn't return to her home world.'

'That's true.'  Miss Morley appears to ponder this for a few moments.  'And then I'd have no leverage against you would I?

'So you'll have to cut a window for us, won't you?  If you want to see her live.'  Miss Morley twists Guilietta's head around so she can see her face.  'Pretty child, isn't she?  I'm sure she'll grow up to be a beautiful adult.

'If you let her.  It's up to you, really, isn't it?'

Will has never seen a smile so utterly lacking in humour.


	17. Culham

_Culham and Colombo, Sri Lanka_

Although Will has been forced to go offline, Judy's and Mary's phones have stayed connected.  Judy has heard Mary's side of their conversation and indistinctly, Will's too.  She has kept her own microphone muted.  She does not want Will to know that she has disobeyed him.

_There must be something I can do!_

She turns her phone's microphone back on.

'Mary?'

'Judy!  You're back!  Where are you?'  

'I'm in the hallway just outside the lab.  I can hear them talking inside.'

'How did you get there?'

'I climbed  the fence and got in through the door where they grabbed Guilietta.  There's a stairwell just behind it. I could hear her shouting from somewhere above me, so I went up the stairs.  There's some kind of control room at the top; it's full of screens and switches and stuff like that.  There were a man and a woman inside – I could hear them talking.  I think the man was hitting Guili.'

'Bastard!'

'I wanted to kill him.  I stayed outside the door, listening.  I heard them talking to Will and Carlo over the Tannoy.  Then they left the room, pulling Guili after them.  She was howling and making so much noise and kicking them so hard―'

'Good.'

'That they didn't hear me following them.  I was shaking, I can tell you.'

'Judy, you've got guts.'

'Thanks.  I can feel them churning around inside me right now.'

'You're all right.  Can you see anything inside the lab?'

'The door's slightly open.  I'll go and take a look.'

'Give us video, can you?'

Judy tiptoes to the door and carefully looks through the gap.  _Don't touch it, it might move and squeak and give me away!_

Judy presses the key sequence that activates her phone's camera.  She points it through the narrow gap in the door, relaying a view of the laboratory to Mary, sitting in front of her TV screen in Colombo.  Then she slips back to the foot of the stairs.

'Right, Judy.  It looks as if nobody's moved.  Greaves and Morley are to the left of the door, as we look at it.'

'I saw them.'

'Good.  Now, Will and Carlo are on the far side of the lab, facing us.  Carlo still has the Knife, although I'm afraid that Miss Morley is going to try to make them hand it over to her in exchange for not harming Guili.'

'What use would that be?  They can't use it.  Don't they need Carlo to work it for them?'

'I think they'll keep it themselves and make Carlo open windows for them.  Their business was based on trading between worlds, using the windows that the Knife had opened before.'

'Trading?  What's wrong with that?'

'It's _what_ they traded, Judy.  They didn't hesitate to trade in drugs, or stolen goods, or even children like Guili.  Anyway, what I think they want to do is keep the Knife, and Guili, hostage, and force Carlo to cut windows for them.

'Knife-cut windows are very harmful to the fabric of the universe.  The angels will try to close the windows straight away, so Morley and Greaves will be using Carlo all the time to re-open them again.  It'll be a race between them and the angels and I think a lot of people will be hurt.  Not just Guili and Carlo, but other people too.  You see, there's the Spectres to consider as well.'

'I remember.  Every time a window is cut, a Spectre is released.  It was a Spectre that killed Guili's mother.'

'Guili…  As long as they have Guili, they've got us over a barrel.'

'So we've got to get her back.  What shall I do, open the door and grab her?'

'That might not work.  Greaves isn't all that bright, but he's cunning and strong.'

'I could make a rush at him.  Catch him off-guard.'

'Don't forget there's two of them.'

'I know.  It's not going to be easy.'

Judy walks slowly, carefully, back to the steel door.  It is heavy and it will take a determined push to open it wide enough to allow her to pass through.  _How can I open it quickly enough to take them by surprise?_

She looks through the gap.  There is Mr Greaves, about ten feet away from her.  He is holding firmly onto Guilietta's wrist with his right hand.  To his left, and partially obscured by him, is Miss Morley.  She can hear her and Will still talking.  She looks at Mr Greaves' profile again.

_Wait a minute!_

Judy whispers into her phone.  'Mary, I've got an idea.'

She puts her shoulder to the door and, a fraction of an inch at a time, eases it open.  She prays that Will and Carlo, who are directly facing her, do not see the door move, or if they do, do not unwittingly betray her with an involuntary gesture or look.

There.  The gap is now nearly nine inches wide.  Wide enough for what she plans to do.

Judy pulls back her right arm and throws her phone as hard as she can at Mr Greaves' head.  On her screen Mary sees a blurred impression of the lab spinning past and hears a thump as Judy's phone strikes the man's right ear.

His head is jerked over to the left by the stinging blow.  He instinctively raises his right hand to his ear.  'What the fuck?'

'Guili!  Run!'  Will's and Judy's voices ring out simultaneously.  Guilietta dodges under Mr Greaves' flailing arm and dashes straight across the laboratory, passing under the cross-bar of the of the test rig H and ducking her head to avoid knocking against it.

'Come back here, you stupid little slag!'  Mr Greaves is enraged beyond belief by the sudden and totally unexpected, pain in his right ear, and Guilietta's escape.  He runs after the fleeing girl and crashes into the test rig, knocking the cross-bar from its supports.

Judy's phone has landed undamaged on its side on a bench behind the place where Mr Greaves was standing and its lens is facing forwards into the laboratory so that Mary sees everything that happens on the TV screen in her Colombo hotel room, albeit rotated to the right by ninety degrees.

When she recalls what happens next, in nightmares or when the memories break through, unwanted, while she is trying to concentrate on her work, it is as if each individual video frame that Judy's phone transmitted to her was stored, frozen, in Mary's brain.  She can play it through forwards and backwards.  She can zoom in on each image and examine it in detail.  Whether she wants to or not.

The cross-bar falls to the floor with a loud clang.  Mr Greaves charges through the gap between the two benches.

And is cut in two by the Thread which is suspended between them.  The invisible, deadly fibre slices cleanly through his lower torso, just above the pelvis.  The lower half of his body falls to the floor by the benches.  His legs twitch twice and stretch out rigid, their muscles and nerves separated from the brain and spinal column which control them.

The upper half of Mr Greaves' body describes a slow arc through the air as it falls across the laboratory towards the stunned Will and Giancarlo.  Guilietta runs into her brother's arms and buries her face in his side.  'Carlo! Carlo!'  The boy wraps his arms around her trembling body and holds her tightly to him.  'Guili, sweetheart, don't look!'

Blood is jetting from Mr Greaves' severed arteries, and a mixture of this and the voided contents of his intestines trails behind him as he drags himself across the laboratory floor, his arms furiously windmilling, his ghastly cries of agony echoing in the open space of the room.

The mutilated body thrashes, face pressed against the floor, by their spattered feet.  Its movements become feebler as the slow seconds pass by, one by one.  Will knows that there is no possibility of staunching the flow of blood from Mr Greaves' heart – the main arteries are open to the air and spurting vital fluid with steadily decreasing force as the amount of available for the man's heart to pump runs out.  The stench of excrement from his sliced-open bowels is putrid and totally overwhelming.

Ohgodohgodohgodohgodohgod.  Judy can hear herself repeating the words over and over again.  _There is no God, silly.  He died and set us free._  The thought does not comfort her.

Will goes down onto one knee and gently turns Mr Greaves' body over so that he can see his face.  His takes his head in his arms.  The man's eyes are filming over.  He has only a few seconds to live now, as the blood which is needed to supply oxygen to his brain dribbles from his torso and pools on the floor.  Mr Greaves' lips move feebly and a few words escape from them.

'Bastards.  Bastards.'  And: 'Elspeth―' His head falls limply in Will's arms.  With a practised gesture, Will passes his right hand over Mr Greaves' face, pulling the lids down over his dead eyes.

He stands up shakily.  'That was…  that was an awful way to die.'

Miss Elspeth Morley crosses the laboratory floor towards them, carefully avoiding the test stand and the pool of blood that Mr Greaves has left.  She is pale and unsteady, but composed.

'He was… very loyal.'  She looks down at the body.  'Doctor Parry, will you see to this, please?'

'Yes, Miss Morley.'

'Thank you.'

She turns away and walks, straight-backed and rigidly self-controlled, over to the doorway opposite, her heels clicking on the ceramic tiles of the laboratory floor.  Wordlessly, Judy pushes the door fully open to let her go through.  Miss Morley, refusing to acknowledge Judy's presence, passes her and walks down the passageway beyond.  A door closes behind her, and she is gone.

'Let's get out of here.'

Judy collects her phone and joins Will, Kirjava, Giancarlo and Guilietta as they leave the laboratory and sit facing one another on two rows of chairs that have been left in the hallway outside.  Guilietta speaks first.

'He was a nasty man.  He hurt me.  Doctor Will, I didn't want that to happen to him.  Did I make it happen?  Was it my fault?'

'No, Guili.  Never think that.  It wasn't you – it was him.'  Will looks at them all.  'It was his own stupidity and greed that killed him.'

'I didn't know…'

Will takes Judy's hand and squeezes it.  'None of us knew what would happen.

'I've got to call an ambulance and I'll have to stay here until it comes.  I can say that Miss Morley found the body and called me, but she was too distressed to stay.  They'll ask her to corroborate my story, and she'll have to appear in the Coroner's court as a witness, but I'm sure she'll be able to handle all that.  There'll be a verdict of accidental death, or death by misadventure, and that will be that.

'The rest of you had better wait for me in the car.  Judy, you'll be OK to drive it up to the main entrance?  I'll tell the police we'd all gone out for a meal or something like that and I was bleeped.  It'll pass.  None of you will have to turn up in court.'

Mary, on Judy's phone: 'The entrance gates are still locked.'

'Right.  We'll have to go up to the control room and open them.'  Will laughs.  'I've forgotten how hard it is, being a criminal.'  _The thumping on the stairs in his mother's house.  The crack of the intruder's head on the floor.  How it all began._

They are quiet for a while.

'OK.  Let's go.'  Will stands up and hold Judy's hand, for which she is grateful.  Giancarlo does not stand up.

'Will, everyone, wait please.  There is something else.  Something we must do.  Something terribly important.'


	18. Culham

_Culham and Colombo, Sri Lanka_

Giancarlo puts his hand to his waist and takes the Knife from its sheath.  He holds it, point upwards, in plain view of them all.

'I do not say that this Subtle Knife is evil, although I know that it has intentions of its own.  But it brings evil, wherever it goes.  In my world, it has robbed us of our self-respect and turned us into thieves and parasites.  It unleashed the Spectre that murdered Guili's mother.  In this world, it has caused… that―' he points towards the door behind which lies Mr Greaves' slowly cooling body, 'and the trade in things and people that you have told me about.

'It betrayed me and Guili in Siemione and Blackbird Leys, and all of us here in Culham.  We trusted it and it let us down.

'In all the worlds, it has allowed the Spectres to rape the minds of innocents.

'Will; you rejected the Knife once, and it shattered.  That should have been the end of it, only it was mended, so that the Exiles could be saved.  If I were to break it again now, it could be mended again.  This time, we must destroy it completely, so that it can never do any more injury to anybody.  Can we do that?'

Will thinks.  'The Knife broke twice.  Each time, it was because I put it up against something stronger than it.  My love for my mother… or Lyra.'

'I love Papa,' says Guilietta.

'Yes, Guili, that would probably work.  The Knife would shatter again if faced with your and Carlo's love for your Papa.  But it would not be enough.  Twice it has been broken, and twice it has been fixed.  If we break it a third time, it can be mended a third time.'

'I see.'

'When Iorek Byrnison and I reforged it, a charcoal fire was hot enough. When it was made, Henry Latrom told me, the philosophers of Ci'gazze used an atomic furnace. When it was re-made here, in our world, the combined powers of the Sky-fires and the Earth-Current were needed.  If we are to melt the Knife down so that it can never be repaired again, we will have to use a fire that is quite unimaginably hot.'

Mary speaks, via Judy's phone.  'Would five hundred million degrees Kelvin be hot enough, do you think?'

'I should think so.  What do you have in mind?'

'The alethiometer told us to look for the Ring.'

Will stands up, smacks his forehead with the flat of his hand and shouts out aloud.  'Stars above, I'm a fool!  I'm a bloody fool!  Of course!

'Can anyone find a floor plan of this place?'

'That's it!'  Will points at the bulky metal structure which looms above them in the semi-darkness.

'What is it?'  Giancarlo can only make out a confused impression of pipes and cables and something that might be a large boiler, copper-coloured.

'It's the thing this place is named after – the JET.  The Joint European Torus.'

'I still don't know what you're talking about.'

'OK.  Look.  Will squats down on the concrete floor and takes a pencil from his pocket.  'From here, it looks like a big hunk of metal.  But from above, it looks like this:' He draws two concentric circles on the floor.  'It's a torus – a ring, like a doughnut, only hollow inside.  "Look for the Ring", the alethiometer said.  Mary and I thought it meant that we should come here, to this building, to find out what was going on; with the buckythread and all.  But I think now that it meant more than that.  I think it means that we should use the JET to get rid of the Knife.'

'How will it do that?'

Mary speaks.  'It's a nuclear fusion reactor, Judy.  No, don't worry, I'm not going to try to explain how it all works.  Just this; it's a device of a class commonly known as a tokamak.  There were a number of them built in the last century – the idea was that you would use them instead of fission-powered nuclear power stations, the sort that run on uranium or plutonium.  They would be clean and safe.  There'd be no nasty nuclear waste to dispose of afterwards and you'd run them, basically, on seawater.

'The trouble was, nobody could get them to output more electrical power than you had to put in to make them work.  The reaction can't be kept going for long enough.

'So the dream died, but the tokamaks stayed, because the thing they do is to generate a substance called _plasma_ inside them.  This plasma is very, very hot.'

'Hot enough to melt the Knife?'

'As hot as a star.'

'Where do we start?'

'Look for an access panel.  You'll need to put the Knife inside the torus.'

'But first―'

'Yes?'

'Carlo had better cut a window to take him and Guili home.'

'Oh yes.  Nearly forgot.  That would have been very silly!'

Giancarlo takes out the Knife and, for what he hopes is the last time, cuts a window to his sunlit home world.  It comes out a long way from Cittagazze or Siemione; he and his sister will have a lengthy journey home.  Maybe that is all to the good.

'Will, there's something else.  If I appear at home, or in Siemione, without the Knife, and tell everyone that the Knife has been destroyed, nobody will believe me.  They'll think I've hidden it somewhere and they'll carry on threatening me, or my father, or Guili, to make me use it.  I need proof that it has gone for ever.'

Will thinks. 'If we were to cut the handle away from the blade, would that do?  The handle is unique.  Everyone knows what it looks like.'

'Yes, that would probably work.  I could show them the handle and they might believe that the blade had been lost or destroyed.'

'Tell them the truth, Carlo.'  _That's what Lyra would say._

They take the Subtle Knife over to a metalworker's bench and clamp the blade in the jaws of a vice.

'Can we snap it off?'

Giancarlo pulls as hard as he can on the hilt, with no effect.  Will hits the side of the handle with a sledgehammer.  The bench shakes, but the Knife remains untouched by the blow.

'Doesn't look like it.  We'll have to try to prise it off the blade.'

Giancarlo hands Will a screwdriver, and with both of them putting their full weight behind it, they manage to lever the hilt away from the blade.  The naked metal of the tang remains, gleaming wickedly, protruding from the vice.  Will looks at the Knife-handle, its wire-formed pattern of angels palely visible against the dark wood.  'Remiel, have you seen this?  Will you be our witness before the angels?'

There is a soft glow in the corner.  'Yes, Will Parry.  I will be your witness.'

The reactor hall is well-equipped.  Guided by Mary, Will and Giancarlo locate a maintenance hatch in the bottom of the torus, open it with a custom wrench, and place the Knife inside, replacing the cover after it.

'Now you've got to pump it out.  There has to be an effective vacuum inside the reactor, else the plasma can't form.  Those look like the pump controls over there.'

Judy and Guilietta sit together by the side of the door, watching Will and Giancarlo as they follow Mary's instructions.  'How does Mary know what to do?' asks Guilietta.

'Because she's very clever.  And because she used to work in a place called CERN, where they do this sort of thing all the time.'

Pumping out the reactor chamber takes time.  Judy and Guilietta doze together on their seats.  Will, Kirjava and Giancarlo sit and talk over old times and future concerns.

'Carlo, there's something you said back there, about Guili's mother and the Knife.  I think you're wrong.  I don't think it was the Knife that made the Spectre that killed her.  It happened at the wrong time.'

'Then what was it?'

'Our friends here.  They were cutting windows with the Thread.  Tiny windows the angels didn't know anything about.'

'You mean they were big enough to let Spectres through?'

'I don't think Spectres understand size the way we do.  I'm sure of it.  It wasn't you – or me – that made the cut that caused Guili's mother's death.  It was them; Greaves and Morley.'

_It wasn't me!  _Giancarlo feels as if a great weight has been lifted from him.

'Then,' he says, 'we must destroy the laboratory here, as well as the Knife.'

Will ponders.  'Yes, but I don't know how we can do that.  Not without bringing the police down on us like a ton of bricks.  A nasty accident; that's one thing.  A dead body and a wrecked lab; that's murder and sabotage.

'Anyway, it wouldn't help.  They'll be backed up―' seeing the look of incomprehension on Giancarlo's face, 'all their records, their knowledge, will be safe somewhere else.  We could destroy all their equipment but they'd rebuild it.'

'So that woman could start it all again?  The windows, and the Spectres?'

'We'll know if they do.  Remiel and the angels will be looking out for attempts to cut windows.  If this all works, and we destroy the Knife, any window that appears in the future can only have been made by them.  We'll stop them, somehow.'

They sit and listen to the steady whir of the vacuum pumps.

'I suppose this is the last time we'll see each other.'

'If Mary is right, yes.'

'If only…'

'If only we could keep the Knife and let the angels clean up the mess it leaves behind.  Visit each other from time to time.  No, you're right, Carlo.  You've got an enormous task ahead of you in your world.  You won't be able to do it – you won't even be able to start – if you don't know, in your heart, that the Knife has been destroyed.'

'I could leave it with you.'

'No you can't!'  Will's smile is grim.  'Isn't that where we came in?'

The pulse of the vacuum pumps changes its note as the air pressure in the reactor approaches zero.   Finally, after what seems an eternity, but has actually been only two hours, the meter readings are low enough.  'Next stage,' say Mary, 'is to run up the magnetic field.  It contains the plasma so that it can't touch the sides of the reactor vessel and burn it.

'If I'm right, the field will lift the Knife from the bottom of the torus and suspend it in the middle, along the axis.'

'How will we know?'

'There must be a viewing window, or a monitor.  Take a look.'

Will and Giancarlo find a number of TV monitors, but it is not clear which one they should use, so they turn them all on, with no result.

'Never mind,' says Mary.  'See that desk there, to your right, with the brass levers?'

'Yes.'

'Those will be the field controls.  Do exactly what I say.  We must run the coils up slowly, or we'll trip circuit-breakers all over Oxfordshire.'

A low hum fills the space of the reactor hall as Will turns on the containment field and monitors the current.  _Good grief!  How many amps does this thing take?_

Judy and Guilietta are woken by the sound and join Will, Kirjava and Giancarlo by the control desk.  The light of the Bellini's homeworld shines through the nearby window, ready and welcoming.  Will looks though it and remembers.  _If I could only see Ci'gazze, just once more.  Where I first met her.  Where I showed her how to make omelettes._

_Damn!  I thought I'd got over all that._

Mary is businesslike.  'OK, crew, we're nearly there.  We've got a vacuum and a containment field.  What we do now is inject the deuterium pellets.  They're the fuel the reactor runs on.  Will, look for a workstation.  The injection sequence is tricky.  It's bound to be controlled by a dedicated app.'

There are a number of PCs and workstations in the hall.  The right one is easy to find, as it is clearly labelled _D Supply_.  Will turns on the screen and is greeted by a login box.  He shows it to Mary.

'Windows!  How quaint!'

'How on earth am I going to log in to this thing, Mary?  I don't know the password.'

'Oh, that'll be easy.  Physicists hate passwords.  Look for a yellow sticky on the monitor or the base unit.'

The password that someone has scribbled on the Post-It is _dioxide_, copied from the label on a nearby fire extinguisher.

'Told you!'

The application they need is already running.

'Someone's been watching too many films!'  Some joker has written the app with a Big Red Button to click on to start the fuel injection sequence.  It is labelled _Armageddon_.

'This is it, then.'

Judy:  'This is Frodo, Samwise and Smeagol and the One Ring, at Mount Doom.'

Will:  'It's Sir Bedevere and Excalibur, at the Lake.'

Judy:  'Peter, High King of Narnia, closing the Door.'

Will:  'Arwen Evenstar claiming the Gift of the One to Men.'

Together, the Knife-bearers move the mouse pointer.

'Now!'

Together, they click on the red button.

For a few seconds it looks as if nothing has happened.  Then, on one of the monitors that they thought was dead, appears a vivid line of violet-white light, running around the circular axis of the toroid.

In the line of light, bathed in its radiance, floats the Knife-blade.  It hangs suspended by the magnetic field, with the ultra-hot plasma flowing over it in feathery streamers of light, flickering and wavering like the celestial flare of the Aurora Borealis.  The Sky-fires.  And, powering the coils, the Earth-Current.

As the seconds pass by, the Knife-blade begins to glow from within, first dark red, then orange, and finally blue-white.  The temperature is starting to build up now, as the eddy currents from the alternating magnetic fields which hold it in place continuously agitate the atoms of which it is made.   Meanwhile, the flowing star-stuff is beginning to strip the metal from its surface, broadening the plasma stream into a wide current, filling half the reactor chamber.  The image on the monitor is becoming intolerably bright, threatening to burn out the screen.

The Knife is already half its original size, as the particles of which it was made join the river of brilliant luminosity inside the torus.  The reaction is eerily quiet – there is no roaring or other sign of the destructive forces unleashed, star-bright, in the plasma current.

At last, with barely a flicker, the last vestiges of the Knife-blade disappear, merged into the current of fusing deuterium atoms.

'Time to go home, chaps.'  Mary says.  Will looks away from the monitor where he and Giancarlo have been watching the death of the Knife.  He suddenly realises that he is crying, tears streaming down his face and soaking into his collar.  He turns to Giancarlo.

'We have done a terrible thing.'

'We had to.  Remember that.'

'Close down the injector.'  Will clicks the shutdown button.

'Have you done it?'

'Yes, look.'  Will uses his phone to show Mary the dialogue box.

'Let's have a look at the monitor screen.'

The fusion reaction is still proceeding.  If anything its glow is growing brighter.

'I don't believe it!  Kill the containment field!'

Will returns the levers that control the magnetic field to the _off_ position.

'Right!  That should do it!'

It does not.  The monitor screen is now brilliant white all over and Will is sure that he can see actinic light leaking through the reactor walls.  A sound is now starting to make itself apparent, a rumbling hissing noise.  Mary cries out in alarm.

'It's not working right!  It's not stopping.  It must be the Knife.  Get out of there, all of you!  Move!  MOVE!'

There is no time to say their farewells.  Giancarlo takes Guilietta's hand and pulls her through the window to their world.  They turn to close the window and wave goodbye, but it is too late.  Will and Judy have gone and there is a flood of unbearable radiance and heat pouring through the window.  Giancarlo rushes round to the other side of it and, for the last time, pinches a window shut, cutting off the blast of annihilating radiation from Will's world.  It is gone, and there is nothing but a patch of blackened grass in front of him, and, seen through the shimmering air, Guilietta, unharmed, still waving to her friends in the world beyond.

Will, Judy and Kirjava run through the doors of the JET complex.  All the windows behind them are lit up with a steadily increasing glare – a mixture of red and orange from the burning buildings and, at its core, the light of a new star come to earth.

They have to climb over the still-locked gates, losing valuable time.  The complex is starting to burn fiercely now and the flames are rising higher and higher behind them.  Reaching the pub car park, they throw themselves into the front seats of the Golf, Kirjava at their heels, and Will starts the engine, flooring the pedal and sending them racing out of the entrance.  They turn left and drive as fast as they can for two or three miles, chasing their own shadow as it flees ahead of them.  Just outside Abingdon, they stop and turn to look.

'Doing this sort of thing got Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt.'

'I'll chance it.'

Behind them a column of smoke and flame rises into the night sky.  They can hear the distant wail of sirens as emergency vehicles rush to the scene.

'You realise we've made history, don't you?'  Will's phone is still connected to Mary's.

'What?'

'This is the first successful continuous slow fusion reaction anyone's achieved.  You could get a Nobel Prize for this!'

'What do you mean – _slow_ fusion?'

'Well, put it this way – a _fast_ reaction would have vaporised the whole county.  You've been lucky.  I wonder what it was about the Knife…' Mary drifts off into her own thoughts.

Will has his thoughts, too.  'Carlo said we should destroy the lab.  Looks like he got his way.  There won't be any problems about the late Mr Greaves, either.'

'Ugh, no.  Will, there'll be people hurt in accidents because of all this – car crashes, burns, fractures.  We should go to the JR.  They'll be needing us there.'

'Yes, we should.'  Will is only half-listening, gazing at the outline of white fire that hovers over the village of Culham.

A mile or more high, a revelation of pure blazing energy, the Subtle Knife burns in the sky above them, pointing defiantly to the stars.


	19. In the Worlds

_Oxford_

Lady Boreal sits at the breakfast table, studying the note that has been handed to her by the footman.  In another world, in an earlier century, it could easily have been mistaken for a telegram.

That would be an understandable mistake.  In fact, it has been sent by means of the lodestone resonator, a device which allows communication between worlds.  It is the means by which the Boreal family have long conducted their day-to-day business and its use did not cease with the brothers' deaths.

The message reads:

_By LR_

_Regret to report total repeat total destruction of Culham facility stop Involvement of Parry crucial stop Subtle Knife involved stop Believe Knife destroyed stop Regret must also report demise of Greaves stop Morley end of message_

Elizabeth reads and re-reads the note.  This outcome is catastrophic beyond her worst imaginings.  Many things of great value have been lost, and her programme set back by several years.

_How could everything have gone so badly astray?_

'You got mixed up.'

'How do you mean?' she asks Parander.

'You didn't know what to do about Will.  You wanted to stop him finding out about the Thread, but you didn't want him to get hurt.  You tried to do two conflicting things at the same time.  No wonder it all went wrong.'

'What about the Knife, though?'

'We didn't know about that.  How could it have come into all this?'

'We may never know.'

'Perhaps Will can tell us.'

'He may suspect us too much now.'

That will have to wait.  Elizabeth has more pressing matters on her mind.  _What am I going to tell the Board?_

_Oxford_

'I must talk to Lizzie, Kir.  I've got to know.  I want to know for sure if she told Greaves and Morley that we were going to Culham and how she did it.'

'It's dangerous, Will.  If she betrayed us before, she may do again.'

'Please!'

'I am most unhappy about this.  It may lead to more danger, more hurt, more pain.'

'But you agree, don't you?'

'Yes, Will.  I agree.'

That night, as he enters REM sleep, Will and Kirjava walk the paths of Dream and Imagination and try to make contact with Lizzie.  This attempt is a failure.

Instead, something else happens.

_Oxford_

They meet on neutral territory, at Brown's restaurant in St Giles.  It is immediately clear to Lizzie, the moment she sees Lyra, exactly what has happened.  She can see that her loss has been balanced, such is the nature of the universe, by Lyra's gain.

Nobody looking at them would guess that Lyra is supposed to be the plain sister, the dowdy academic, and Lizzie the fortunate daughter of a famously beautiful mother.  Lyra sits on the edge of her chair, in a state of childlike excitement, radiating so much happiness that the diners sitting nearby cannot help but be infected by it themselves and wish that they could catch just a little of her joy and keep it, preserved in a jewelled casket, for the times when they feel sad.

'You've talked to him, haven't you?'

'Yes.  Yes!  Is it that obvious?  Why, haven't you?'

'No, I have not.  I'm not sure that I ever will again.'

A brief shadow flits across Lyra's face.  She clasps Pantalaimon to herself.

'I'm sorry, Lizzie.  But think,' she brightens again, for her sympathy for Lizzie cannot depress her for very long, this day of all days, 'I'll be able to relay messages for you just like you did for me.'  She touches her sister's upper arm.  'Don't worry.  It'll all be fine!

'Now, what do you want to eat?  It's my treat today, and I'm hungry!'

_Oxford_

A week after the Culham Incident, Judy is woken by Will's involuntary movements as he enters the dream-state.  She lies next to him, and watches him, his stern face lit by the moonlight which streams through the window above them.  She sees him relax, sees his joyful smile and knows that his is talking to his Lyra.

_I should be happy for him.  I _must_ be happy for him._

She knows that she is being selfish.  _How can we carry on like this?  She's slim and blonde and pretty, so he says, and I'm just plain old Judy Beckley.  I'm real and she's real too, but she's there and I'm here.  I've got some rights, haven't I?_

Judy's jackdaw-daemon whispers in her ear.  'Be patient, Judy.  Give them time.  Give us time.  It'll work, if we make it.'

'It won't!'  Judy sits up.  'How can I lie here and know that he's… talking to her!  It'd be bad enough if he was just dreaming of her, but this is much, much worse!'

'Remember I love you.  Will loves you.  What did you do, that first night you spent together?'

'You know what we did.  We told each other stories.'

'That's right.  Always remember that.  You told each other stories.  Our lives are stories. True stories.  They may be happy or unhappy – but they must be true.  If you and Will and Kirjava and me simply tell each other our stories, our true stories, then all shall be well.'

'"And all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."  You are the wiser part of me.'

'Skaven.  My name is Skaven.  I didn't know it until now.'

'Let's go back to sleep, Skaven.'

_Cittagazze_

Guilietta comes crashing through the front door.  'Papa, Papa!'

'Guili!  How's my little girl?'  Giovanni Bellini takes Guilietta to his chest and hugs her tightly.  After a while he turns to his son, Giancarlo.

'Now then, Carlo.  Where've you been hiding, while we have had all these troubles here in Ci'gazze?'

Giancarlo sits down.  'It's a long story, Papa.'


	20. Afterword and Author's Notes

Firstly I'd like to make an apology. If you live, or have lived, or will someday live in Blackbird Leys, then I'm sorry if you feel I have insulted you. I appreciate that the people who live there are doing their best right now to turn Blackbird Leys into a decent place.

Apart from my gross libel on a south Oxford housing estate, all the other places mentioned in this story are as real as I can make them. I mean you'll be able to find them on a map – the places in our world, anyway.

This is really a science fiction story, set in the HDM universe and using its characters. The Internet-enabled wide-bandwidth videophones that Will, Mary and Judy have seem perfectly reasonable for eight years hence; the surgical nanotechnology rather less so. As for running up a tokamak with a bloody great lump of metal inside it – I don't think so! But why let the facts get in the way?

Characters, names, places and situations from HIS DARK MATERIALS belong to Philip Pullman. The angel Remiel is the property of DC Comics – his name is, anyway. Everything else is mine, mine, all mine, and copyright © 2002, Ceres Wunderkind.

Thanks go to those readers who supported me as I wrote and posted this yarn, especially Morpherkidvb, who reviewed nearly every chapter as it came out. If this story has an emotional core it's in Chapter 12, and MKVB's generous review of it came close to melting this particular writer's heart. I'd also like to offer a special thank you to the anonymous contributor (who prefers to remain anonymous) who gave me the phrase "St Tullio of the Knife", told me I had to write a Ci'gazze story to go with it, and insisted that I mention the Last Redoubt. Not forgetting the proprietors of the Babel Fish, for its assistance with English/Italian translations. Of course, it's not the Fish's fault if I got anything wrong.

As ever, there are windows left open, though which stories may freely stream out into the Void beyond. Do Will and Judy have any prospects of future happiness together? Will Giancarlo be able to show the people of the world of Cittagazze how to make a proper life for themselves? What will Lizzie and Miss Morley do now? How was it that Judy was able to see Kirjava and recognise Skaven so quickly? Was the Subtle Knife really destroyed, or was it (intentionally) transformed into something altogether new?

That is, as they say, another story. You can read about what happens next in THE KING'S COUNCILLOR, also on FF.NET.

Ceres Wunderkind, May 2002

P.S. One other thing – there's something about the Subtle Knife that's been bothering me for ages. We know, because Philip Pullman tells us, that the Knife is very sharp indeed. So sharp that it can cut through anything that is made of ordinary matter with, apparently no effort at all. So far, so wonderful.

There's a problem, though. The Knife is infinitely sharp, true. But it's not infinitely thin. So when it makes a cut, it has to push aside the two halves of the thing it cuts, just as if it were a wedge being driven between them. (I'll let the Knife be frictionless, although PP doesn't say it is.)

This isn't a problem if at least one end of the thing being cut is free to move, like the lamppost Will cuts through in the present story. Even so, the Knife lifts a lamppost that probably weighed a sizeable fraction of a ton as it passes through it, if only by a quarter of an inch. But, in _THE SUBTLE KNIFE_, Will cut through the bars of an iron fence at Sir Charles Latrom's house. Which means that the Knife pushed apart most of the fence, or if not, cracked or broke one or the other of the end-points of the bars, or bent them aside. That would have taken real energy and real effort to accomplish.

It seems that there are, after all, limits to what the Knife, wielded by a human, can cut.


End file.
